Did Paul invent Christianity?

In Galatians, writing in anger: the good news he preached "is not according to man. For I didn’t receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came to me through revelation of Jesus Christ." He adds that he did not go up to Jerusalem to the apostles who were there before him, but went into Arabia. Three years later he did go, to visit Peter, and stayed fifteen days.

He is under attack and defending his independence, which is a reason to read it carefully. It is also as clear a statement of where he thought his authority came from as anybody could ask for.

Writing to Corinth: "I delivered to you first of all that which I also received", and then a compressed formula about death, burial and resurrection with a list of witnesses.

Whatever he means by having been taught by no one, this passage has him quoting, and what he quotes is older than the letter it sits in. The two statements are in tension inside one man’s correspondence, which is where most of the argument lives.

The letters were written about twenty to thirty years after the crucifixion, and the earliest of them, 1 Thessalonians, is usually taken to be the oldest book in the New Testament. Almost everything a reader knows about the first twenty years comes either from Paul or from Acts, written later by someone who admired him.

So the sequence is not the one the New Testament prints. The letters come first, and the narrative that frames them was written afterwards.

"Beyond measure I persecuted the assembly of God and ravaged it", he writes, and elsewhere calls himself the least of the apostles for that reason.

Whatever happened on the road, the persecution is not something he would have invented about himself, and both his own letters and the later account agree on the shape of it.

The case for the charge: justification by faith rather than by law, the admission of Gentiles without circumcision, the cosmic account of what the death accomplished, and the confidence to break with the practice of the Jerusalem leadership. Those are things his letters do, and they shaped what followed.

The case against it: the formula he quotes already contains the death, the burial, the resurrection and the appearances, and it predates him. On that reading he is the first great interpreter of a claim he inherited, not the author of it.

His own account has an agreement about who goes to whom, followed by a public confrontation. Acts has a council and a decision, in a considerably calmer register.

Which of those is closer to what happened bears directly on the question. A movement that argued and stayed together is a different thing from one that split and lost the other half.

Thirteen letters carry his name. Six of them are argued about: the three Pastorals, Colossians, Ephesians and 2 Thessalonians, which leaves the seven known as the undisputed letters. The disputed six contain a good deal of what is popularly attributed to Paul, including some of the sharpest instructions about households and about women, though an undisputed letter, 1 Corinthians, has one of its own.

Anyone assessing what Paul did to Christianity has to say first which Paul they mean, and the answer changes the verdict.

He refers to it and does not describe it. The vivid version is in Acts: a light from the sky, a voice, and men standing speechless, "hearing the sound, but seeing no one". That book tells the story three times, with differences between the tellings, and its author does not claim to have been there.

Something changed a persecutor into the movement’s most energetic advocate. What it was is not recoverable, and the man it happened to chose not to say much.

Paul’s opponents made their case too, and none of the earliest surviving texts is theirs. Almost everything known about their position comes from the man arguing against them, at the moment he was most annoyed; Acts, whose author was on his side, adds a little. Matthew’s Gospel, written later, has been read as a reply.

A reader who feels the force of his case should remember that the reply is missing, and that this is exactly the situation in which one side sounds obviously right.

The claim that Paul invented Christianity is often doing other work: separating a teacher whose ethic the speaker likes from a theology they do not. That is a preference rather than an argument, and whether it is a good one does not depend on the history.

The historical question stays open and answerable in principle. The rhetorical use of it is a different thing and worth noticing when it appears.

Benedict XVI, in his catecheses on Paul, spoke of God turning him into "a splendid apostle" and "a founder of Churches". The Catholic Church receives his letters as scripture, and Benedict found in them the theme of the Kingdom "reproposed in a new form, but always in full fidelity to the tradition of the historical Jesus".

He would have agreed with the last part with some force. The first part he had to defend, in Galatians and in 1 Corinthians.