5. Under the Torah of Christ. As a Jew Paul decisively turned his back on the Torah revelation given to Moses on Mount Sinai, with all of its laws, customs, and traditions. In other words, Paul abandoned his Judaism. He would have never put it that way, though, since what he advocated he called a new and true Judaism, making the first version obsolete. He maintained that the Torah had now been replaced and superseded by the new Torah of Christ (Galatians 3:23–26). He never denied that the one God of Israel, who had sent Jesus and glorified him as Son of God, had once spoken through Moses and the Prophets. What he insisted upon was that alongside the one God of Israel was an exalted heavenly Lord Jesus, to whom the whole cosmos would be in obeisance. He also believed that the new revelations he was receiving as the Thirteenth Apostle made anything that had gone before pale by contrast (2 Corinthians 3:7–9). For Paul there was no comparison between what the Torah of Moses promised the nation of Israel—physical blessings of prosperity, well-being, and peace—and the incomparable spiritual glory now promised to those destined to be part of the new cosmic heavenly family of glorified children of God. This process of cosmic birthing constituted a new spiritual “Israel,” a new covenant, and a new Torah, replacing the old.
What Paul proposed as a replacement of the Torah of Moses he called the Torah of Christ. It was not a legal code, written in stone or on parchment, but a manifestation of the Christ-Spirit in those who had been united with Jesus through baptism, both Jews and non-Jews. It was this agency of the Spirit that defined the new Israel and enabled the select group to have both the motivation and the power to struggle against “the flesh.” In contrast, the Law of Moses was powerless to actually deliver anyone from the power of sin that had its root in the flesh, since all it could do is define what was good. Paul put his own “life in the Spirit” forward as the model for his followers to imitate and was often disappointed in their seeming inability to “walk in the Spirit,” since they failed to exhibit even the minimum standards of righteous behavior.
6. The Battle of the Apostles. Paul understood his own role as an apostle, “last but not least,” as he put it, as the essential and pivotal element in God’s cosmic plan to bring about the salvation of the world through Christ. Though he expressed grief over his former life as an opponent and persecutor of the Jesus movement, stressing that he was unworthy even to be an apostle, he nonetheless believed that his call to be an apostle was a singular and extraordinary event (1 Corinthians 15:9–10). Unlike the other apostles, who had been chosen by Jesus at the beginning of his preaching in Galilee, Paul believed that he had been set apart and called before he was even born—while still in his mother’s womb (Galatians 1:15). Given this perspective one might conclude that rather than being last, Paul was chosen before all the others. His “conversion,” then, would just be a matter of God determining the time was right to reveal Paul as an apostle. As Paul puts it: God chose to “reveal his Son to me” (Galatians 1:16). This places him in a rather extraordinary position with reference to the original apostles, since he understood that his singular position as the “Thirteenth Apostle” was to take the message about Christ to the non-Jewish world. This special mission, he believed, was essential for him to complete before the end of the age could arrive. Just as Christ was sent to his own people, the Jewish nation, to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, Paul, as a kind of “second Christ,” was commissioned to go to the entire world (Romans 15:8–9). He believed that his specific role as an “apostle to the Gentiles” had been prophesied by Isaiah and that he, as a Suffering Servant, along with Christ, would also pour out his blood as an offering, and thus “fill up what is lacking in Christ’s suffering” (Philippians 2:17; Colossians 1:24; Isaiah 49:1–6). Here Paul clearly believes that his own suffering, added to that of Jesus, was needed to fulfill God’s universal plan.
Paul’s relationship with the original apostles was sporadic and minimal. He is emphatic about this point, swearing with an oath to his followers that the gospel message he received directly from Christ came as a heavenly revelation and was not in any way derived from consulting with, or receiving authority from, the original Jerusalem apostles (Galatians 1:16–18). Paul spoke of the Jerusalem leadership sarcastically, referring to James, Peter, and John as the “so-called pillars,” and “those reputed to be somebody,” but adds, “what they are means nothing to me” (Galatians 2:6, 9). At the same time he insisted that they gave him the right hand of fellowship and wished him well in his mission. It is possible that the leaders in Jerusalem had initially reached some sort of “live and let live” working agreement with Paul. His work, which was almost exclusively with non-Jews, would not interfere with their own preaching to Jews.
Sometime in the mid to late 50s A.D., Paul made a clear and decisive break with the Jerusalem establishment. In one of his last writings, an embedded fragment of a letter now found in 2 Corinthians, he declares “I am not the least inferior to these super-apostles,” and ends up calling them “false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ” (2 Corinthians 11:5, 13). He had also become terribly bitter against his fellow Jewish Christians who maintained their Jewish faith: “Look out for the dogs, look out for the evil-workers, look out for those who mutilate the flesh,” sarcastically referring to the practice of circumcision (Philippians 3:2). Tradition has it that Paul ended up in prison in Rome alone, with few supporters (2 Timothy 4:16).
Most scholars have interpreted this bitterly denunciatory language as directed against a group of unnamed Jewish opponents, not the Jerusalem apostles. I think this is mistaken. The radical nature of the break that took place between Paul and the original apostles is so threatening to our most basic assumptions about Christian origins that it is easy to think that it just can’t be true, but the evidence is there. Unfortunately, outside of Paul’s letters there is little in the New Testament to document it further. After all, the entire New Testament canon is largely a post-Paul and pro-Paul production. But Paul himself provides his side of the story and that is more than enough to reconstruct what happened. Fortunately a few additional sources outside the New Testament writings have survived that support what we can construct as the other side of the story. We will discuss these in the final chapter. They provide us with solid evidence of just how bitter and sharp the break between the Jerusalem apostles and Paul became.
If some of the elements of this brief overview of my analysis of Paul seem strange and unfamiliar to readers, that should be no surprise. Paul proved too radical, too apocalyptic, and too controversial even for the emerging Church in the second through the fourth centuries. He was domesticated, first by the author of Acts, as I have noted, but subsequently by letters written in his name, purporting to be from his hand, that are found in the New Testament. Paul was appropriated as a hero, a courageous preacher, and a martyr, who was responsible for taking the gospel beyond the Jewish world, but the radical content of his message, and his view of his unique calling and mission, were lost to subsequent generations of Christians. What Paul most expected to happen never came about and his grand vision of the imminent transformation of the world, and his pivotal role therein, utterly failed. The Paul who was appropriated over the centuries was a theological Paul, particularly as understood by Augustine and Luther. Paul was removed from his historical context and recast in terms of the great doctrines of Christianity, namely, predestination, justification by grace through faith, reconciliation, redemption, sanctification, and eternal life. The ethical teachings of Paul also had a practical and enduring legacy, from his incomparable celebration of the primacy of love in 1 Corinthians 13, to his views of women, sexuality and marriage, divorce, and other social issues. The thirteen letters attributed to Paul in the New Testament make up nearly one-quarter of the New Testament and they are the primary documents that have shaped the course of Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Protestant Christianity.10