Critical Questions

Paul is the best-documented and the most contested of the apostles, and honesty requires that the disputes be named rather than smoothed over. This file gathers the major historical and scholarly questions — the chronology of Paul’s life, the authenticity of the disputed letters, the “New Perspective on Paul,” the relation of Paul to the historical Jesus, the recurring charge that Paul “re-founded” Christianity, and Paul’s relation to Judaism — and states, on each, what the evidence allows and where the genuine disagreement lies.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

Chronology: Acts and the Letters

The first cluster of questions concerns the dating and sequence of Paul’s life, where the Acts of the Apostles and the letters do not always align. The one near-fixed point is Paul’s appearance before Gallio at Corinth (Acts 18:12), dated by the Delphi inscription to c. A.D. 51–52; from it the rest is reckoned. The central unresolved problem is the number and identity of Paul’s Jerusalem visits — whether the meeting of Galatians 2:1–10 is the council of Acts 15 or the famine visit of Acts 11 — which affects the date of Galatians, the placing of the Antioch incident, and the whole early chronology. These are treated in full in Acts and Pauline Chronology; the honest summary is that the skeleton (conversion in the 30s, council c. 48–49, major letters in the 50s, death in the early-to-mid 60s) is secure, while specific dates remain named ranges (Riesner, Paul’s Early Period, 1998; Lüdemann, Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles, 1984).

The Authenticity of the Disputed Letters

The second cluster concerns which letters are Paul’s. Seven (Romans, 1–2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon) are undisputed; six (Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, and the three Pastorals) are contested in varying degrees, the Pastorals most of all. The arguments — vocabulary and style, theology and church order, historical setting — and the counter-arguments, together with the question of ancient pseudepigraphy and the Orthodox reception of all thirteen as canonical Scripture, are set out in The Disputed Letters and the Corpus. The verdict differs by letter and remains genuinely open (Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament, 1997; Ehrman, Forgery and Counterforgery, 2013).

The “New Perspective on Paul”

The third cluster concerns the meaning of justification and Paul’s relation to the Judaism of his day. The “New Perspective,” beginning with E. P. Sanders’s argument that first-century Judaism was a religion of “covenantal nomism” rather than legalistic works-righteousness (Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 1977), and developed by Dunn and Wright, holds that Paul’s polemic against “works of the law” concerns the boundary-markers separating Jew from Gentile and the inclusion of the nations, not works-righteousness in general. It has been vigorously contested. The debate, and its relation to the Orthodox patristic reading of grace and participation, is treated in Grace and Righteousness [Disputed: the “New Perspective” (Sanders 1977; Dunn; Wright 2009) is contested by defenders of the older “Lutheran” reading and by the “apocalyptic” school (e.g. Carson, O’Brien, Seifrid, eds., Justification and Variegated Nomism, 2001–2004); the field remains divided].

Paul and the Historical Jesus

A recurring question is the relation between Paul and the Jesus of the Gospels. Paul, who never met the earthly Jesus, rarely cites his teaching directly (though he does at points: the prohibition of divorce, 1 Cor. 7:10–11; the support of apostles, 1 Cor. 9:14; the words of institution, 1 Cor. 11:23–25), and his letters dwell on the death, resurrection, and lordship of Christ more than on the sayings and deeds of the Galilean ministry. Some have argued this reflects ignorance or indifference to the historical Jesus; others, more persuasively, that the letters are occasional pastoral writings, not catechisms, and presuppose a body of teaching about Jesus rather than rehearsing it, and that Paul’s emphasis on the cross and resurrection is exactly the apostolic kerygma, not a departure from it [Disputed: whether Paul’s relative silence about the sayings and deeds of the earthly Jesus reflects discontinuity from the historical Jesus (so a strand of older liberal scholarship) or simply the occasional, kerygmatic character of his letters which presuppose the Jesus tradition (the more common current view, e.g. Wenham, Paul: Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity?, 1995); the question is debated]. The Orthodox tradition has never sensed a rupture: Paul preaches the same Christ the Gospels narrate, received “by the revelation of Jesus Christ” (Gal. 1:12) and confirmed in communion with those who had walked with him (Gal. 1:18; 2:1–10).

The “Second Founder” Charge

A more radical version of the previous question, urged by some modern critics (and earlier by figures from Reimarus to Wrede and beyond), holds that Paul, not Jesus, was the real founder of Christianity — that he transformed the simple ethical message of the Galilean prophet into a redemption-religion of a divine, dying-and-rising Savior, drawing on Hellenistic mystery-cult and apocalyptic motifs. This thesis was pressed hard by the older history-of-religions school but has lost much ground, as scholarship has recovered the thoroughly Jewish and scriptural roots of Paul’s thought and the continuity of his gospel with the earliest Jerusalem kerygma (1 Cor. 15:3–8, where Paul explicitly hands on what he “received,” the common apostolic tradition of the death and resurrection) [Disputed: the thesis that Paul was the “second founder” who Hellenized a simpler original gospel (Wrede and the older Religionsgeschichtliche Schule) is now widely judged overstated, with most scholars stressing Paul’s continuity with the earliest Jerusalem tradition he cites in 1 Cor. 15:3–8 (Hengel, The Pre-Christian Paul, 1991; Sanders 1977)]. The Orthodox tradition holds, as it always has, that Paul faithfully preached the one apostolic gospel and added nothing of his own invention (Gal. 1:8–9).

Paul and Judaism

Finally, the question of Paul’s relation to his ancestral faith has been reopened in our own time by the “Paul within Judaism” or “radical new perspective” school, which argues that Paul remained a Torah-observant Jew who addressed his law-free message only to Gentiles, never intending to call Jews away from the Law (Eisenbaum, Paul Was Not a Christian, 2009; Nanos and others). This is a minority and contested position, but it marks how alive the question of Paul and Judaism remains [Disputed: the “Paul within Judaism” reading (Nanos, Eisenbaum 2009), holding that Paul remained fully Torah-observant and directed his law-free gospel only to Gentiles, is a contested minority position challenged by most who read Gal. and Rom. as relativizing the Law’s role for all believers]. The Orthodox reading honors Paul’s enduring love for his people Israel (Rom. 9–11) and the Jewish roots of his gospel, while holding that in Christ “there is neither Jew nor Greek” (Gal. 3:28) and the Law’s role as a “schoolmaster” has reached its goal (Gal. 3:24–25).

How These Questions Are Held

The Orthodox Church receives Paul as apostle, saint, and inspired author of canonical Scripture, and reads his letters within the living tradition of the Fathers (see The Eastern Reading of Paul). That confession is not threatened by the honest acknowledgment of historical and critical questions; rather, the tradition has always distinguished the what of the Church’s faith from the how of historical reconstruction. The questions gathered here are real, and several are genuinely open; naming them honestly, with the positions and their sources, is itself the discipline this collection observes (per METHODOLOGY §2–3). The reception-history that follows shows how the Church has read Paul through every age (see Reception and Legacy).

References

The Holy Bible, King James Version. The Epistles to the Galatians, Romans, First Corinthians.
Sanders, E. P. Paul and Palestinian Judaism. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977.
Hengel, Martin. The Pre-Christian Paul. Trans. John Bowden. London: SCM Press, 1991.
Wenham, David. Paul: Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity? Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995.
Eisenbaum, Pamela. Paul Was Not a Christian: The Original Message of a Misunderstood Apostle. New York: HarperOne, 2009.
Carson, D. A., Peter T. O’Brien, and Mark A. Seifrid, eds. Justification and Variegated Nomism. 2 vols. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck / Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001–2004.
Brown, Raymond E. An Introduction to the New Testament. New York: Doubleday, 1997.