Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 179:715 (Jul 2022)
Article: Jesus And Paul’s Gospel: Perpetuating The Early Church Tradition
Author: Crhistian D. Cardona

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Jesus And Paul’s Gospel: Perpetuating The Early Church Tradition

Crhistian D. Cardona

Crhistian D. Cardona is Research Master in Religion and Theology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Abstract

The debate about the Jesus tradition versus Paul’s gospel has passed through different stages: from total discontinuity to a more significant continuity, and then to a measured delimitation of such continuity. The present study is located in this last stage and focuses on Paul’s use of the Jesus tradition. It argues that Paul’s emphasis on the Easter events and his interpretation of them clearly indicates his awareness of the Jesus tradition and his projection of it in his own way.

The debate about Paul and the Jesus tradition, which is the story of Jesus’s life, ministry, teachings and sayings, passion, death, and resurrection, goes back to the year 1831, when F. C. Baur, a Tübingen scholar, started to challenge the continuity between Jesus and Paul. His main premise was that Paul “developed his doctrine in complete opposition to that of the primitive Christian community.”1 This trend was followed by Wendt and Wrede, who sustained that Paul went further than Jesus while focusing more on the means of salvation than on Jesus’s teachings about pure piety (Wendt), thus taking Christianity to the next level (Wrede).2 In the early twentieth century, Rudolf Bultmann continued the trend started by Baur, followed by Walter Schmithals and

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in the modern era by Francis Wright Beare, Lloyd Gaston, Nikolaus Walter, Frans Neirynck, and others.

Parallel to those arguing for the discontinuity of the Jesus tradition in Paul were those who claimed continuity. In the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, scholars such as Heinrich Paret, Hermann von Soden, Arthur Titius, Harry Kennedy, Arnold Rüegg, Heinrich Julius Holtzmann, Johannes Weiss, William Davies, Hans Windisch, and Archibald M. Hunter proposed the continuity of the Jesus tradition in Paul from different grounds. The majority looked for parallels between the sayings of Jesus contained in the Gospels and the Pauline Letters.3

The increasing amount of research on Paul and the Jesus tradition revealed an interesting shift from the initial question. Those arguing for continuity not only asked the question of the continuity of the Jesus tradition in Paul, but they also started to look for parallels in order to find the origin of Paul’s knowledg...