Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 85:2 (Fall 2023)
Article: J. Gresham Machen’s "The Origin Of Paul’s Religion" After 100 Years: Paul’s Gospel And The Shape Of Pauline Studies Since 1921
Author: William B. Bowes

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J. Gresham Machen’s The Origin Of Paul’s Religion After 100 Years: Paul’s Gospel And The Shape Of Pauline Studies Since 1921

William B. Bowes

William B. Bowes is a PhD candidate in New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Edinburgh.

Since the publication of J. Gresham Machen’s The Origin of Paul’s Religion in 1921, scholarly interpretation of Paul and his theology has gone through a significant series of transformations. At that time, Machen’s work was one of the most thorough repudiations of the idea that Paul’s message had any basis (Hellenistic or otherwise) other than his encounter with Jesus himself, with Machen intending to minimize the growing distance between Paul and the earliest followers of Jesus that was being proposed in the scholarship of his day. While many of the initial responses to Machen’s work were positive, the field of Pauline studies began to change dramatically in the decades following his work, and that requires both a careful re-evaluation of what Paul’s gospel is and how Machen’s insights might be re-read considering these changes. This article will assess how Paul’s gospel has been interpreted since 1921, examining developments over time. The analysis will begin with an examination of Machen’s original work and the responses to it, and it will proceed by analyzing literature related to the origin of Paul’s message over three series of decades that have followed, with a view to affirming the importance of Machen’s interpretive approach and enduring influence.

In 1921, J. Gresham Machen wrote his first major scholarly contribution as a response to trends in scholarship at his time relative to the apostle Paul.1 These trends were largely informed by the Tübingen school and a series of publications in the early twentieth century which had begun to attempt to broaden the disconnect between the message of Paul and that of Jesus.2 As will be shown, this is certainly still attempted today, as even in recent

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publications Paul is called something like “the founder of Christianity” and a perceived distance between him and Jesus is amplified more or less depending on the author and his persuasion. In Machen’s day, though, part of what he was attempting to counter was a scholarly push to determine the sources of Paul’s gospel apart from Judaism or the OT and to locate them within a pagan and Hellenistic milieu. Hence, a large part of Machen’s work is taken up with responding to this idea.

The question of the origin of Paul’s religion, or the source(s) of his message, is p...