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Thursday, March 21, 2024

Why don't the gospels have Jesus anticipating Paul?

It's often suggested that later Christians attributed words and actions to Jesus that advanced their later theology, preferences, and so on. The Jesus of the gospels is at least largely a fabrication of later Christianity.

There are a lot of ways to respond to that sort of claim. What I want to focus on here is a counterexample that doesn't get as much attention as it should. The Jesus of the gospels doesn't anticipate Paul. He doesn't address the controversies surrounding his apostleship, his not having been with Jesus "from the beginning" (John 15:27; see, also, Acts 1:21-22), etc. We don't just see controversies surrounding Paul in his letters, but also in other sources (2 Peter 3:15-16, first- and second-century heresies that opposed Paul).

Think of Luke especially. He thought highly of Paul and says a lot about him in Acts. But Jesus doesn't anticipate Paul in Luke's gospel. To the contrary, he highlights the significance of having twelve apostles (Luke 22:28-30), and the opening of Acts even has a set of requirements for apostleship that would exclude Paul (1:21-22).

This sort of refraining from reading Paul back into the gospels (and the earliest portions of Acts) is even more significant when interacting with critics who allege that Paul created Christianity, radically redefined it, or something else along those lines. If later Christianity was shaping the gospels and the earlier portions of Acts as much as critics often suggest, you wouldn't know it from looking at the relationship between those documents and Paul.

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