by Jeffrey William Gillette

In the spring of 1985, a theology student at Duke University's Divinity School posted this essay to net.religion.christian, the academic Usenet group that then served as the internet's primary forum for Christian discussion. Jeffrey William Gillette was responding to the perennial charge against Paul — that Christianity would be better off without him, that Paul corrupted the simple message of Jesus into a religion. His reply is a compact piece of theological argument: historically informed, genuinely engaged, and still sharp after forty years.

Gillette's central claims have held up well. Paul's letters are indeed the earliest witnesses to Christianity, predating Mark by five years and John by three decades. Paul's "domestication" by the pastoral epistles remains a live question in Pauline scholarship. And his observation that the "words in red" are no less interpretive than Paul's letters — that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are not transparent history but theological witness — is now a commonplace of New Testament studies. In 1985, posted from a Duke physiology department server, it was still fighting talk.

The battle cry of theologians in the early years of the 20th Century: "Away with St. Paul — give us the pure simple words of Jesus!" And why not? Was Christianity founded by Paul or by Jesus? Was Jesus a theologian? Did the early church turn the world on its head by the power of their university degrees? And even a cursory look at the words in red will show a picture of Jesus as enlightened and tolerant (or do they merely show him as ambiguous). Perhaps Harnack was right: Jesus gave us a way to live, and Paul turned it into a religion!

The question, in fact, goes well beyond the 20th Century. It seems that Paul was an embarrassment to the 2nd Century church also. His most loyal adherents were the Gnostics (who liked his emphasis on intellect), and Marcion (someone has said that Marcion was the only man to understand Paul — and he misunderstood him). There may be more than a little truth in the rumor that, had the pastoral epistles (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) not shown up and "domesticated" Paul in the eyes of the Great Church, the apostle to the Gentiles would have drifted off into the same obscurity reserved for other sectarian and heretical writings.

BUT, St. Paul's writings did not drift off into obscurity. At the most crucial stages in the history of the church it was to Paul — not to the Gospels — that theologians turned to make sense of Christianity. What is there in these short letters that could command the undivided attention of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and the like? Even at the end of the apostolic times, the writer of 2nd Peter calls Paul's letters Scripture (graphoi) — the only New Testament writings called Scripture by another New Testament author!

St. Paul wrote eight or ten letters to specific churches, answering specific questions with specific advice. Yet to focus on the specific details of Paul's instructions would be to miss completely the apostle's true genius. In fact, Paul is at his weakest when he attempts to give specific instructions. Consider 1 Corinthians: in chapter 11 Paul explains how a woman is to act when praying or prophesying in the church, yet in chapter 14 he commands that women must be silent in the church! In the same letter, Paul informs us that the very laws of nature dictate which hair styles are appropriate. Needless to say, Christian thinkers have not turned to these passages in moments of supreme spiritual enlightenment.

The real genius of St. Paul lies in his penetrating insight of human existence. Thus Paul writes of the anguish of the person who desperately wants to obey God's laws, yet can't find the power within himself, and of the victory made available through the Holy Spirit. And Paul meditates on the "wisdom" of the Cross, and the new life made available to us through faith in it. And, note especially, that this same Paul claimed that, in Christ there is no freeman or slave, no Jew or Gentile, no male or female, but all are equal. Paul's genius was his intense perception of what it means to be human — warts and all; how God has intervened in our existence through the life, death, and (most importantly) the resurrection of Jesus Christ; and what sort of new existence we can enjoy as God's own people.

By the way, for the benefit of historians, Paul's letters are the earliest witnesses to Christianity. All the authentic Pauline epistles were written before 60 AD — 5 years before the earliest Gospel (Mark), and at least 30 years before the last Gospel (John). The words in red are not the words that Jesus said. They are the words the evangelists thought he said, the words he might have said, and, sometimes, the words he should have said (or so they felt). I suspect that a good deal of history can be gleaned from the pictures of Jesus presented by the Gospels, but it is simply not fair to say that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John give us history, while Paul gives us theology. Every book in the New Testament is primarily an interpretation of God's work through Jesus.

Does Paul speak to you? It depends on what you want to hear. But don't make the mistake of seeing the trees and missing the forest in the apostle's letters. And don't make the mistake of believing that the words in red ink are any different than the words in black ink.

Colophon

Written by Jeffrey William Gillette, The Divinity School, Duke University, and posted to net.religion.christian on April 12, 1985. Gillette was responding to a recurring debate on the group about whether Paul corrupted Jesus's message — the Protestant liberal tradition of Harnack distilled into Usenet argument. His essay stands on its own as a compact defense of Pauline theology and an early statement of what would become standard critical New Testament scholarship: that the Gospels are interpretation, not transparent history, and that Paul's letters — earlier than any Gospel — are the primary witnesses to first-century Christianity.

Original Message-ID: [email protected]

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

🌲