By the Numbers

for which I was appointed a preacher and an apostle and a teacher  2 Timothy 1:11  NASB 1995

Was appointed – According to one source,[1] Paul wrote about 28 percent of the “New Testament.”  That source, however, included the letters to the Hebrews as Pauline which is most likely not the case.  So, you might conclude that Paul really didn’t write all that much of our contemporary New Testament, especially if we also exclude the six or seven letters that some scholars consider non-Pauline.  All of this calculation is based on counting the number of words, not the impact of the theological ideas, but that seems to ignore the most important element of the Pauline corpus.  Let’s view this another way.  Consider the fact that at least three of the four gospels are significantly repetitious.  They make up 49,132 words of the total 179,011 New Testament words.  That’s 27.4%.  “Not as much as the Pauline corpus cited above,” you say.  Let’s treat John separately even though he also has repetitious material.  John is another 15,635 words, or 8.7%.  Then there’s that material about Paul.  The book of Acts which is primarily about Paul and his journeys represents another 3.3% (18,450 words).  So, other than the gospels, Pauline writings and Pauline history represents 66.8% of what Christians consider their uniquely sacred material.  One man—two-thirds of the source documents.  In fact, we could look at it this way:  Yeshua and stories about Yeshua occupy one-third of the collection; Paul and stories about Paul essentially occupy the other two-thirds.  Is it any wonder that some scholars see Paul as the real author of New Testament Christianity?

Does that cause any concerns?  Well, it certainly did in the earliest days of the Christian Church.  Yeshua’s material appears to be eminently Jewish.  He lives in the Jewish world, speaks as a Jew, behaves like a Jew, and is executed for being a rebellious Jew.  Paul, on the other hand, appears to be Christian.  In fact, the Church in general doesn’t even consider him Jewish.  He’s the first God-appointed convert.  As a result, his material becomes the baseline of Christian theology.  You might ask yourself if Christian theology would even be possible it it weren’t for Paul.  Yeshua is much too Jewish to have started a new religion.  He even thinks he came to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, not the world’s larger Gentile population.  It takes Paul’s unique vision to push the Gentile question to the forefront.  Peter might be the precursor to the Pope, but Paul is the foundation of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin.

Maybe you’ve never thought of it this way.  A man who wrote approximately one-third of the New Testament as letters to people we will never know much about under circumstances we can only speculate about becomes the father of virtually all the theology we believe.  In fact, the stories of Yeshua actually contain very little theological instruction compared to Paul’s letters.  It is significant that most Christians know more about the life of Jesus and less about what he actually taught than they know about Paul’s instructions.

While Buddhism and Islam are based primarily on the teaching of the Buddha and Mohammed, respectively, Christianity is based primarily on the person of Christ.  Christianity is not belief in the teachings of Jesus, but what is taught about him . . .  The appeal . . . to believe as Jesus believed, rather than to believe in Jesus, is a dramatic transformation of the fundamental nature of Christianity.[2]

Christians, it might be claimed, follow the teachings of Paul while adding the story of Jesus.

Now, it may be true that Paul was only interpreting what God revealed in His Messiah, Yeshua, and that as a result, all of Paul’s teaching is merely an extension or a clarification of what is implicit or declared in Yeshua’s word, but that seems to raise some serious difficulties with Paul’s urgent apocalyptic orientation, his comments about women, his statements about the ethnic makeup of the Kingdom, or his ideas about the “second Adam.”  Since we don’t believe Paul was divine, perhaps we need to reconsider his place in the canon.  Just thinking out loud, so to speak.

Topical Index:  Paul, canon, New Testament, teaching, doctrine, 2 Timothy 1:11

[1] https://www.alecsatin.com/how-much-of-the-new-testament-was-written-by-paul/

[2] Kegan A. Chandler, The God of Jesus in light of Christian Dogma, pp. 248-249, citing Harold Brown, Heresies, p. 13.