WHAT DO WE DO WITH PAUL?

Icon of Saul’s Conversion on the Road to Damascus. Courtesy of the author.

“And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.” (1)

Romans 8:28 carries strong personal importance for me. After the sudden death of my father when I was 12 years old, I struggled to make sense of what exactly Dad’s death meant, and likewise why it had to happen at all. The Apostle Paul put into words a deeply held belief that I already had within myself: God was still working even through the immense pain of losing a parent. Paul’s words, for me, very clearly reflected Jesus’s own words to his disciples as he ascended to his Father: “…behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (2)

However, my experience and history with Paul is not shared by all. Whether it be studying the Bible in my bachelor’s degree, or in seminary, or even in the average parish I visit, I hear a common quip that seems to be almost a default position for some: “I listen to Jesus rather than Paul.”

Where exactly did this “I listen to Jesus rather than Paul” sentiment come from? Why is there a perceived separation between Jesus and Paul, and why does this seem to be such a widespread belief that these sentiments are sometimes even heard from preachers in the pulpit?

Paul: Distorting Jesus or Faithfully Interpreting Jesus?

The history of anti-Paul (3) sentiment mostly follows a form that pits Paul against Jesus. The core assumption is fairly straightforward: Paul, in his writings, distorts the real Jesus into a form that is untrue to the original person. Examples include Paul’s position on slavery or the limited roles he gives women in the church assembly. Paul is interpreted as being opposed to Jesus’s explicit ministry of setting the captive free (4) or of Jesus’s many interactions with the women who follow him. (5) An easy solution follows this assumption: discount or ignore Paul completely. And this particular approach is a lot older than one might think.

The discount/ignore approach to Paul appears prominently with both Christian and secular Enlightenment thinkers of the 17th and 18th century. (6) A memorable example of this approach is Thomas Jefferson’s The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, or “Jefferson’s Bible,” in which Jefferson copies and pastes certain passages from the Gospels that depict Jesus as a moral leader and teacher and consigns the rest of the Bible to the waste basket – a waste basket that includes every writing of Paul. (7)

This approach is especially powerful given the important and pressing social issues that have arisen within the past 300 years. A common defense of the horrors of chattel slavery from the white slavers of the United States was to appeal to the passages of Paul that refer to slaves remaining obedient to their masters. (8) This intensely damaging experience is summed up perfectly in Howard Thurman’s heartbreaking account of how his grandmother, a former slave, didn’t want any writings of Paul to be read to her. (9) Likewise, some advocates for women’s rights label Paul a misogynist for his writings about the role of women. (10) George Bernard Shaw, famous Irish playwright, once wrote, “[Paul] does nothing that Jesus would have done and says nothing that Jesus would have said…[he is] the eternal enemy of Woman.” (11) Many within the LGBTQ+ community point to the damaging language that Paul uses in describing same-sex attraction as a sin, and argue that Paul is at the root of the historic oppression of their very humanity. (12)

In each case, we see a similar Jesus-Paul dichotomy as the Enlightenment thinkers, but with a different set of problems. Whereas the Enlightenment was suspicious of Paul’s supernatural claims distorting Jesus, now Paul is seen as a social oppressor in direct opposition to the liberating Jesus. 

The issues outlined so far must indeed be taken seriously and treated carefully. However, to simply discount or ignore Paul leads to deep historical and theological problems: what exactly does it mean, then, for Paul’s writings to have been included in and treated as Holy Scripture for the entirety of Christian history? If Paul got it wrong, does that mean that the Bible we have today needs to be adjusted? If Paul got it wrong, did God really have anything to do with Paul’s writings in the first place?

I propose that there is another approach to understanding Paul that provides a measure of resolution to these deeper problems: all of Paul’s writings must be put in dialogue with each other. In other words, one must critique Paul with Paul. 

This second approach is employed regularly within the theological debates of the early church. Take, for example, the Marcionite controversy of the 2nd century. Marcion taught that the majority of Paul’s writings are the truest Holy Scripture and also inherently denied that the God of the Old Testament was in any way associated with Jesus Christ. (13) The issue for Marcion was a problem of Jesus’s divinity: if Jesus really was divine, and therefore not subject to the corporeal reality of humanity, then there is no way he could have really been human. (14) He interpreted any accounts of the New Testament depicting Jesus as human to be suspect, including large portions of the Gospel accounts. Paul was, therefore, the only correct interpreter of Jesus, on account of Paul’s more mystical rendering of Jesus, such as the wonderful rendering of Christ’s crucifixion in Galatians 2.

Marcion’s orthodox opponents disagreed with the main assertion: that Jesus was simply not human. The way they argued their point, however, needs to be emphasized: instead of denigrating Paul as an authority, they rather insist that Marcion’s interpretation of Paul was flawed. Paul repeatedly references Jesus’ humanity at critical moments in his arguments, such as the depiction of Jesus in 1 Corinthians 15 as the Second Adam. (15) The orthodox response to Marcion argued that not even Paul understood Christ’s corporeality as a hindrance to him being God, and this can be demonstrated in a more careful reading of Paul’s own writings. (16)

This approach to Paul has also been applied to current social issues. The Rev. Dr. Esau McCaulley, in his most recent book, Reading While Black, demonstrates that Black readers of the New Testament regularly employed this strategy of internal critique to white slavers’ interpretation of Paul. It is most certainly true that the white slavers and their apologists regularly made use of the parts of Paul’s letters that specifically commanded slaves to be obedient to their masters as justification for the system of chattel slavery. However, McCaulley points out that these same people avoided other passages of Paul: “…it is interesting to note that other portions of Paul’s letters such as Galatians 3:28 were not popular among slave masters.” (17) For McCaulley, it wasn’t Paul’s writings that were the problem; rather, it was that the white slavers’ interpretation of Paul’s writings was fundamentally wrong. 

Again, for 20th century feminist theologian and biblical scholar Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Pauline writings of the New Testament weren’t the problem for affirming women in ministry. Instead, the issue was the interpretive context in which Paul’s writings were employed, as she argues that the Roman culture within the early church seemed to conveniently ignore Paul’s astonishing assertion that “…there is no longer Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male and female, for you all are one in Christ Jesus.” (18) Rather than characterizing Paul as a misogynist, an assertion that Fiorenza roundly dismisses, she instead appeals to Paul’s own writings. Fiorenza asserts that it is through the right interpretation of Paul that women should be properly understood as having gifts as teachers, preachers, and theologians even from the beginning of the Church. (19)

Similarly, Luke Timothy Johnson has argued that these same texts of Paul are solid grounds supporting the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ persons into the full life and ministry of the church. In a recent article that Johnson wrote for Commonweal Magazine, he argues that the specific instructions concerning social and sexual activities are not the chief interpretive principle of Paul. Rather, it is Paul’s core conviction that, in Jesus, absolutely every expression of humanity is not only included, but consummated to its fullest extent. (20)

This second approach to Paul not only avoids the problems brought about by the discount/ignore approach, but it also attempts to harmonize with a commitment to the Bible of the historic Christian tradition. It is my conviction that we cannot just throw out passages from Paul that don’t suit current trends. Rather, we have to wrestle with Paul, often uncomfortably, and perhaps discover that Paul is a far more elusive and complex thinker than he may seem at first. 

Conclusion 

The very fact that anti-Paul sentiment is so mainstream is not a cause for alarm. Instead, it is an invitation to know Paul better. What we should be cautious of, however, is the all-too-easy approach of reading Paul in opposition to his own Savior and Lord: “I listen to Jesus rather than Paul.” Instead, we must read what Jesus has done with Paul to move him from persecutor of the Church to the greatest advocate for the Church. And this requires us to read all of Paul and to appreciate his complexity, as someone whose writings are a vessel that the Holy Spirit continues to speak through even to modern day.

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1. Rom. 8:28, New American Standard Bible (all following biblical references will be from the NASB)

2. Matt. 28:20b

3. In this article, “Paul” and “Pauline” are shorthand for referring to the corpus of letters attributed to him in the New Testament. It is not intended to be a comment on the debates surrounding authorship.

4. c.f. Matt. 20:28

5. Perhaps the chief example of this is Mary Magdalene, which in the Gospel accounts is the first witness (or at least one of the first witnesses) to Jesus’s bodily resurrection.

6. The rationalists of the Enlightenment had good intentions: how do we square what we observe in nature with the supernatural events described in the Bible? One of their methods, however, was to simply consign supernatural occurrences referenced within Scripture as simply impossible and untrustworthy, a method that has rightly come under scrutiny in recent years.

7. Other thinkers that tend to do the same thing include the Irish philosopher John Toland, German theologian Frederich Schleiermacher, and German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

8. Eph. 6:5-8; Col: 3:22-25

9. Howard Thurman. Jesus and the Disinherited. Pg. 30.

10. For example: 1 Cor. 14:35-38 and Col. 3:18.

11. George Bernard Shaw. “Preface to Androcles and the Lion: On the Prospects of Christianity.” https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4004/4004-h/4004-h.htm#link2H_PREF (Accessed 4.7.2021).

12. For example: Rom. 1:26-27.

13. Marcion also treated the portions of the New Testament that referred to Jesus being corporeal as suspect, including large portions of the Gospel accounts.

14. For a far more in depth treatment of this issue, see The Mosaic of Christian Belief: Twenty Centuries of Unity & Diversity by Roger Olsen.

15. 1 Cor. 15:21-28.

16. c.f. Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem. Ed. Ernest Evans, 1972. Accessed 4.7.2021. http://www.tertullian.org/articles/evans_marc/evans_marc_00index.htm

17. Esau McCaulley. Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope. Pgs. 18-19.

18. Gal. 3:28; c.f. also Col. 3:11.

19.  Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins.

20. “Homosexuality and the Church.” Luke Timothy Johnson for Commonweal Magazine. June 11, 2007. (https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/homosexuality-church-0) Accessed 3.23.2021.