This post contains questions raised by Bart Ehrman in the intro text to his course “Paul and Jesus: The Great Divide” at BSA. Reformatting is mine.
Virtually everyone agrees that Jesus’ life and teaching stand at the foundation of the Christian faith. No Jesus, no Christianity. But Paul hardly ever mentions Jesus’ words and deeds. For him, the entire point of Jesus’ life was his death, to be followed by his resurrection. They alone, not what he taught or did during his public ministry, matter for salvation.
- Should Paul be considered a follower of Jesus’ teachings? And, conversely, should Jesus be considered a Christian?
- Did Paul transform the religion of Jesus into the religion about Jesus? Or is it more complicated than that?
- How can scholars know what Jesus really said and did if all we have are later accounts written about him, decades after his life, by people who didn’t know him and who described his words and deeds in light of their own beliefs?
- What did Paul, writing before the Gospels, actually know about what Jesus said and did during his life?
- Why did he say so little about it? Did he assume his readers already knew all about Jesus’ life and teachings?
- Did he think they [Jesus’ teachings] didn’t matter for salvation? Did he think they were irrelevant to the issues he was addressing in his letters?
- Was Paul’s view of Christ as a pre-existent divine being the same as Jesus’ own view of himself and his mission? Did Jesus call himself God?
- Jesus preached an apocalyptic message that God would soon destroy all who were opposed to him and bring a new, blessed kingdom to earth. People needed to repent and return to God, doing what he commanded in order to be saved. Is that the same as Paul’s gospel of Jesus’ death and resurrection as the only way to salvation?
- Jesus instructed his followers to keep the Law and live for others in order to be right with God. How does that compare with Paul’s view that keeping the law cannot bring salvation?
- If Jesus was right, that a person could enter the kingdom by behaving the ways God demanded, why would he have to die? And if Paul was right, that only belief in Jesus’ death and resurrection could bring salvation, why wasn’t that the focus of Jesus’ own teachings?
- Did Paul’s insistence that a person could be saved apart from keeping the law, did he advocate “lawless” behavior? On what grounds could he insist on ethical behavior? For Paul, does God care if a person keeps the Law?
- In sum: are Jesus and Paul on the same page when it comes to such major issues as:
- who Jesus himself was,
- how a person can be saved, and
- how one ought to live?
If so, why do they have so many differences? If not, did they have fundamentally different religions?
My Questions:
- Would Jesus have read Paul’s mail in the Synagogue as he did when he read Isaiah?
- Would Jesus teach what Paul taught?
- They were alive at the same time. So, if they had met, would they have been friends?
- Would Jesus have invited Paul to be one of the twelve?
- In our modern church, when Paul’s mail is read, would Jesus stand?
