In my upcoming course I’ll be talking about whether Peter and Paul were at odds.  That might seem like a strange and implausible idea to some people.  But from a historical perspective, there is nothing at all unlikely about it.  We know that Paul had enemies (among the Christians!) all over the place.  Some of these anti-Pauline Christians were surely authors.  It would be absolutely fantastic if we were to discover some of the letters of Paul’s opponents.

Let me put this into a wider historical context.  In BROAD terms Paul appears to have agreed in major ways with those who were followers of Jesus before him.

I get asked all the time if I think that Paul is the true founder of Christianity and whether we should call it Paulinanity instead of Christianity (and related questions).  My answer is decidedly NO.   One reason that seems obvious to me, but not apparently to everyone, is that Paul did not himself invent Christianity.  He inherited it.

It is difficult to establish a firm chronology of Paul’s life.  There are scholars who have devoted many years just to this topic.  It’s messy and complicated.  My colleague from Duke, Douglas Campbell, has just written an-over-400-page book dealing just with the chronology of Paul’s *letters*, Framing Paul: An Epistolary Biography.   It is about how to situate the surviving letters of Paul (Douglas accepts ten of the thirteen as authentic – all but 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) chronologically in relation to one another.  I haven’t read it yet, but Douglas is a very smart fellow and I imagine it will be a standard work for a very long time (though I doubt that he will convince the majority of scholars that Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians are authentic.  But maybe he will!)

In any event, however one arranges Paul’s letters, it is possible to give a *rough* sense of the chronology of his life, which would suggest that he was about the same age as Jesus (I would suppose) and that he converted to be a follower of Jesus some three years or so after Jesus’ death, before starting in on his own missionary endeavors.  We get to that rough chronology of the date of his conversion by considering some of his personal autobiographical/chronological statements (after three years I did this; after fourteen years I did that) and tying them together with incidental other pieces of information from his letters and, less so, from information found in the (not altogether reliable) book of Acts.

Paul himself and the book of Acts are both quite explicit that he was persecuting Christians rigorously *before* he converted.  Which means there were Christians before him.  He also indicates that he *received* information about Jesus’ death and resurrection from those who came before him (see 1 Cor. 11:22-24 and 15:3-5).  Those who were Christians before him were certainly declaring that Jesus had been raised from the dead; and they certainly had drawn the conclusion that Jesus was God’s suffering messiah and that therefore his death was a fulfillment of God’s plan and of the Jewish Scriptures.

Paul was not the one who made all that up.  He inherited it.  It’s true that he may have worked out the implications of these views more fully than any of his predecessors, and that he developed the early theology of the Christians with particular flair and emphasis.  But developing the theology (understanding of God) and Christology (understanding of Christ) and soteriology (understanding of salvation) and ecclesiology (understanding of who makes up the people of God) of the Christians is not the same thing as *inventing* them.

Paul did have some unusual views, though, and these are almost certainly what led to the most controversies.  For a long time, for example, I think Paul himself came up with the idea that gentiles could be members of Christ’s body, the church, without converting to Judaism.  And he certainly saw himself as the one called by God to make this proclamation to the gentiles.  Some or all of the Jerusalem apostles (Jesus’ own disciples and his brother James) may not have been totally comfortable with this view (as suggested in Gal. 2:11-14).  And other aspects of his view may have been found offensive to them or others.

We make a very big mistake if we think that early Christianity represented Pauline Christianity.  I don’t think that was the case at all.  Paul did put a very distinctive stamp on early Christianity, and that had a very large impact on the subsequent history of the church and its theology.  But in his own day, Paul was simply one voice among many.

We don’t see that because of how the New Testament itself was later formed, with the core being The Gospels on the one hand and the writings of Paul on the other hand (I had a friend in graduate school who used to refer to the “general” epistles [also called the “catholic” epistles] as “the junk mail at the end of the New Testament”).   Paul is claimed to be the author of 13 of the 27 books of the NT; another book (Hebrews) was admitted into the canon because church fathers thought (wrongly) that he wrote it; another book (Acts) is largely written *about* Paul.  So from a canonical perspective it seems that early Christianity is all about Jesus and Paul.

But historically I don’t think it was that way.  And here’s one piece of evidence.  In five of Paul’s six “church” letters (the letter to Philemon is written to an individual, not to a church) he indicates clearly that in each of the communities he has Christian enemies who are saying nasty things about him and who are advocating views of the Gospel that are different from his (Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians; the exception is 1 Thessalonians).

That means that in Paul’s own churches there were alternative forms of Christianity that were alive, well, and, evidently, flourishing.   And what about the churches not associated with Paul?  Surely that would be most of the churches of his day.  I don’t think there is any way they were “Pauline” in their character.

Let me stress, Paul’s enemies, in all these letters of his, are within the church.  That is, they were Christians with other perspectives.  Surely these people were not idiots.  They must have included intelligent and possibly literate Christians who disagreed with Paul just as avidly and vociferously as he disagreed with them.  We have his letters to see what he says about them.  What we don’t have are letters that they themselves wrote to explain, justify, and support their alternative views, and to express what they thought about him.  I really wish we did!