It should be called Paulianity – for centuries Christians have presented the ideas of Paul as the teachings of Jesus, and that’s a mistake. It was all Paul’s INTERPRETATION. Check the data.

There is a real observation buried in this: Paul wrote more New Testament books than anyone, and he argues in ways Jesus mostly did not. If "Paulianity" means Paul drew out implications and applied them to new situations, that is true — the question is whether drawing implications is the same as inventing a religion.

1. Expanding an idea is not replacing it. Every teacher's students apply the teaching to questions the teacher never faced. Jesus addressed Israel under the old covenant; Paul addressed Gentiles in Corinth and Rome after the resurrection. Applying a master's principles to new cases is what a faithful student does, not what a rival does.

2. Paul's letters are earlier than the Gospels. This is the fact that reverses the usual intuition. Romans, Corinthians, and Galatians were written in the late 40s and 50s; the Gospels were written later. Paul is not a later corruption of the Jesus tradition — he is our earliest written access to it. If anything, the burden is on showing that the later Gospels contradict the earlier letters.

3. He quotes tradition older than himself. "For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day" (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). The formula is pre-Pauline, and most scholars date its content to within a few years of the crucifixion. Paul is handing on material, and he says so. He says the same about the supper: "For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you" (1 Corinthians 11:23).

4. He explicitly marks his own opinion. In 1 Corinthians 7:12 he writes, "To the rest I say (I, not the Lord)." A man building a religion around his own authority does not stop to flag which sentences are his. The distinction is decisive against the charge that Paul conflated himself with Christ.

5. The Jerusalem apostles ratified him. Galatians 2:9: James, Cephas, and John "gave the right hand of fellowship to Barnabas and me." Galatians 2:6: those who seemed influential "added nothing to me." Paul's account is self-serving, granted — but it is also falsifiable, and his opponents in the same letter are the circumcision party, not the Twelve.

6. He could have been shut down and wasn't. The men who had eaten with Jesus had every motive and every opportunity to denounce Paul. Acts 15 records a public dispute over Gentile admission that was settled in council, not by a coup. If Paul had invented a different Christ, the eyewitnesses were alive, present, and in authority. That they endorsed him is evidence of continuity.

7. Peter calls Paul's letters Scripture. 2 Peter 3:15-16 calls Paul "our beloved brother" and says that in his letters "there are some things... hard to understand", "which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures." A first-century Jewish apostle grouping Paul with Scripture is early and striking testimony to how he was received.

8. The turn: the objection needs the Gospels to be the only source. The argument only works if the Gospels give us raw Jesus and Paul gives us interpretation. But the Gospels are themselves theological documents written decades later by people interpreting Jesus for their communities. There is no uninterpreted Jesus available to compare against. Once you see that, "Paul interpreted, the Gospels didn't" collapses — everyone in the New Testament is interpreting, and the question becomes which interpretation is true to the events.

9. Hostile sources see one movement. Pliny, Tacitus, and second-century critics describe Christians as people who sing to Christ "as to a god" and who follow his teaching. None of them reports two rival factions, one Pauline and one Petrine, with different Christs. The split the objection needs does not appear in the record, including in the record of Christianity's enemies.

Paul is not a rival to Jesus; he is the earliest witness to him, and he says so repeatedly. The real question is not whether Paul interpreted — of course he did — but whether his interpretation matches the events. That question has an answer, and it is found in the same place Paul points: the empty tomb.

Sources: David Wenham, Paul: Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity?; E.P. Sanders; N.T. Wright; Larry Hurtado.

Related challenges:
• Did Jesus really claim to be God, or did His followers just say that about Him? Might not Dan Brown have been on to something?
• Jesus is a borrowed myth dressed up like a Jew. He never existed, period. There is zero SUFFICIENT evidence that Jesus ever existed? Zero. It’s all a terrible hoax for the church to control the masses.
• What’s so special about Jesus, anyway? Aren’t we ALL God’s children?!