The Authority of Jesus and the Authority of Paul

In recent decades, some Christians have claimed that the Authority of the Jesus of the Gospels is greater than the authority of the apostle Paul.  Since Jesus, the Incarnate Word of God, is the ultimate revelation of God, they argue, the example and teaching of Jesus in the Gospels is of higher Authority than the teachings of Paul, who was a mere human being and therefore fallible.  Usually, this claim is made by Christians who wish to discard some theological or ethical teaching of Paul; by pitting Jesus against Paul, they can justify rejecting a particular teaching of Paul by arguing that this teaching does not line up with the example and teaching of Jesus, our highest Authority.  

Now, it is certainly true that the Person of Jesus Christ is the highest Authority over the Church and that any authority the apostles have is a secondary, delegated authority.  However, there are serious historical and theological problems with claiming that the Jesus of the Gospels has greater authority than the teachings of Paul and the other apostles.  Some claim to find support for the idea that Paul’s teachings lack Divine Authority in the writings of Paul himself.  However, these claims are problematic and unconvincing.

The Gospels and the Apostles

The claim that the Jesus of the Gospels has greater Authority than the Pauline epistles is based on the idea that, by reading the Gospels, we can get back behind the apostles and have direct access to Jesus Himself.  Such an idea has serious historical problems.  Paul wrote his epistles before any of the Gospels were written, possibly decades before some of them were written.  It is Paul’s epistles, not the Gospels, that provide us with the earliest information we have about Jesus and His ministry. Furthermore, Mark and Luke were not even apostles; they were associates of the apostles, which means that, in terms of authorship, Paul’s epistles are more directly apostolic than these two Gospels.^[1]Many Christian scholars also question whether Matthew and John were the actual authors of the Gospels traditionally attributed to them. If they were not, then this would mean that all four of the … Continue reading

More significant than chronology, though, is the fact that the Gospels are not simply neutral, “objective” historical records of what Jesus said and did.  Aside from a few details, the Gospels tell us almost nothing about Jesus’s early life, and they summarize three entire years of His public ministry in a relatively short amount of text.  John writes that “Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of His disciples that are not written in this book.  But these are written so that you may believe Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and by believing you may have life in His name. . . And there are many other things that Jesus did, which, if they were written one by one, I suppose not even the world itself could contain the books that would be written” (John 20:30-31, 21: 25).  This makes explicit what should already be obvious: the apostolic community was selective about what words and deeds of Jesus to record in the Gospels, according to what they thought was important.

Furthermore, the authors of the Gospels arranged and presented the words and deeds of Jesus that they did record in a particular way in order to communicate their particular theological agendas.  We can see this clearly from the fact that the four Gospels differ in the order and details of parallel sayings and deeds of Jesus that they record.  While the four Gospels are fundamentally in agreement, they each have their unique theological emphases and ideas that they seek to communicate about Jesus.  

The Gospels do not give us unmediated access to the historical Jesus.  What the Gospels tell us about Jesus is mediated through the apostolic community.  In other words, the Gospels are just as much apostolic as the New Testament epistles are.  We cannot get back behind the apostles and have direct access to Jesus.  Christian faith is apostolic, or it is nothing.  Either we accept the teachings of the apostles about Jesus, as found in both the Gospels and the epistles, or we accept neither.  What we cannot do is accept the apostolic teachings of the Gospels and reject the apostolic teachings of the Pauline epistles.

There is also a theological problem with claiming that the Jesus of the Gospels has higher theological Authority than the Pauline epistles.  The book of Acts begins, “In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach until the day he was taken up to heaven” (vv. 1-2).  The implication is clear: Jesus did not cease acting and teaching after He ascended into heaven; He continued to act and teach through the Holy Spirit.  When the apostles, Jesus’s specially chosen ambassadors, preached the word of God by the power of the Holy Spirit, Jesus was at work in and through them.  Jesus and the Holy Spirit cannot be separated, nor is one more Authoritative than the other, since, as Trinitarian theology tells us, they are the same God.  

The Authority of Paul

There are two sayings in Paul’s epistles which some Christians point to in order to argue that Paul’s epistles do not have the status of inspired Scripture.  The first is 1 Corinthians 7:10-12: “To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): A wife must not separate from her husband.  But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. And a husband must not divorce his wife. To the rest I say this (I, not the Lord): If a brother has an unbelieving wife and she is willing to live with him, he must not divorce her. . . But if the unbeliever leaves, let them go” (vv. 10-12, 15).  Since Paul here clearly distinguishes between what the Lord says and what he says, some Christians argue, this shows that Paul himself did not believe that everything he taught in his epistles was the authoritative word of God.

However, there is no reason to think that the distinction Paul makes here between the Lord’s teaching and his own teaching is meant to indicate that Paul’s own teaching is mere human opinion that lacks any authority.  It is very clear from reading Paul’s epistles as a whole that he believed his status as an apostle gave him the authority to authoritatively speak God’s word.  When Paul distinguishes between what the Lord said and what he says, he is merely referring to the fact that Jesus explicitly addressed the issue of divorce (Matt 5:31-32), but never explicitly addressed the issue of what a Christian should do if they are married to a nonChristian.  So, Paul here gives a new (Divinely Authoritative) directive about how to deal with this situation.

The second saying of Paul that some Christians use in order to argue that Paul’s epistles do not have the status of inspired Scripture is 1 Corinthians 7:40: “In my judgment, however, she is happier if she remains as she is. And I think that I too have the Spirit of God.”  Here, some Christians argue, Paul offers his opinion about something and merely says that he “thinks” he has the Spirit of God; therefore, Paul was in doubt about whether he really was speaking by God’s Spirit.

The problem with this interpretation of this verse is that it is impossible to read the rest of Paul’s writings and to conclude that he was in doubt about whether he had God’s Spirit.  Paul clearly and explicitly claimed that he preached a Gospel that came through a direct revelation from Jesus Christ (Gal 1:11-12), that Christ was speaking through him (2 Cor 13:3), and that his teachings were not a human word, but the very word of God (1 Thess 2:13).  Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians, “I think that I too have the Spirit of God,” does not express doubt about whether he had God’s Spirit or not.  It seems that Paul here was being a little ironic.  He was saying to those who might disagree with him, “You think you have the Spirit of God?  Well, I (an apostle!) think so too!”  This verse does not in any way support the idea that Paul thought his teachings lacked Divine Authority.  

In his epistles, Paul often expresses an attitude of gentleness and humility, opting to persuade rather than forcefully command.  However, this is not because Paul had doubts about his apostolic authority.  It is because Paul sought to exemplify Christlike love and servant leadership.  When the situation called for it, Paul was willing to assert his apostolic authority clearly and explicitly.  Paul’s epistles, along with the rest of the apostolic epistles, should be regarded by Christians as Scripture equal in authority to the Gospels.

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