Jesus or Paul? Why You Don’t Have to Choose

Scroll long enough and you will meet the claim: Jesus taught love and obedience, but Paul came along and invented a different religion. Choose Jesus, the argument goes, and set Paul aside. Some say it to defend the commandments; others say it to escape them. Either way, it asks you to tear the New Testament in half. This study shows why you do not have to. The real conflict is not between Jesus and Paul. It is between what Paul actually wrote and the way much of modern Christianity has misread him.

The “Jesus or Paul” trend

The idea is not new, but it has found a large audience online. It usually runs like this. In the Gospels, Jesus says “keep my commandments.” In the churches, people quote Paul to say the law is done away and the Sabbath no longer matters. So, the reasoning goes, Paul must have overruled Jesus.

Notice what has actually happened. People have been taught to read Paul through a tradition that says the law is abolished, and then they blame Paul for the tradition. The fair question is not “Whom should I follow?” but “What did Paul really say?”

Chosen by Christ

Paul did not appoint himself. When Jesus stopped him on the road to Damascus, He told Ananias:

But the Lord said unto him, Go thy way: for he is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel:

Paul said his gospel came “by the revelation of Jesus Christ” (Galatians 1:12). He passed on the Lord’s Supper as something “I have received of the Lord” (1 Corinthians 11:23), quoted the words of Jesus that “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35), and told the churches, “Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1). A man trying to replace Jesus does not keep pointing back to Him.

The apostles vouched for him

If Paul had invented a new religion, the men who walked with Jesus would have been the first to say so. They said the opposite. Paul went to Jerusalem and laid his gospel before the leaders of the church:

And when James, Cephas, and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that was given unto me, they gave to me and Barnabas the right hands of fellowship; that we should go unto the heathen, and they unto the circumcision.

When the whole church met in council over a dispute in Acts 15, its letter to the believers called him “our beloved Barnabas and Paul, Men that have hazarded their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 15:25–26). And Peter, near the end of his life, wrote this:

And account that the longsuffering of our Lord is salvation; even as our beloved brother Paul also according to the wisdom given unto him hath written unto you; As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.

Peter calls Paul “our beloved brother,” puts his letters alongside “the other scriptures,” and warns that people would twist them. That warning describes our situation exactly.

Peter did not warn against Paul. He warned against people who would twist Paul.

Paul and the one true God

Far from inventing a new idea of God, Paul gives some of the clearest statements in all of Scripture about who God is. He does not describe a three-in-one being. He names one God, the Father, and one Lord, His Son:

But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him.

For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus;

That is exactly what Jesus Himself taught when He prayed to His Father as “the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3). On the nature of God, Paul and Jesus speak with one voice. We set out that truth in full in The Godhead.

Did Paul abolish the commandments?

This is the heart of the controversy. Jesus said:

If ye love me, keep my commandments.

Did Paul teach the opposite? Let him answer in his own words:

Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law.

Wherefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good.

Which law did he mean? He tells us: “I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet” (Romans 7:7). That is the tenth of the Ten Commandments. And he wrote plainly that what matters is “the keeping of the commandments of God” (1 Corinthians 7:19). Paul also kept the Sabbath himself: “Paul, as his manner was, went in unto them, and three sabbath days reasoned with them out of the scriptures” (Acts 17:2).

So what did Paul say was done away? Not the Ten Commandments, but the ceremonial system of sacrifices and ordinances that pointed forward to Christ. He calls it “the handwriting of ordinances” that Christ took “out of the way, nailing it to his cross” (Colossians 2:14), and “the law of commandments contained in ordinances” (Ephesians 2:15). The sacrifices met their fulfilment in the sacrifice of Christ. The moral law, which God spoke with His own voice and wrote with His own finger, did not. Jesus said the same: “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil” (Matthew 5:17). For the verses most often used to set the Sabbath aside, see our Sabbath Cheat Sheet.

Paul did not abolish the law of God. He defended it, kept it, and set aside only the ceremonies that pointed to Christ.

Paul preached the same love

Critics often say Jesus preached love while Paul preached rules. Put their words side by side. Jesus said all the law hangs on love to God and love to neighbor:

And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Paul said the same thing:

Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.

For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

Neither of them set love against the law. Both taught that love is what the law looks like when it is lived. And when Paul spoke of grace, he never meant permission to disobey: “not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified” (Romans 2:13).

You don’t have to choose

The Gospels and the letters of Paul were given by the same Spirit and tell of the same Lord. Jesus chose Paul. The apostles welcomed him. Peter called his letters Scripture. Paul named the same one God, the Father, and the same one Lord, Jesus Christ. He defended the same commandments, kept the same Sabbath, and preached the same love. The only “Paul” who contradicts Jesus is the one built out of soundbites and pulled from his context.

So read Paul for yourself. Read whole letters, not single verses. Ask what he meant by “law” in each place, and let his clear statements explain his difficult ones, as Peter advised. You will find that the man who wrote “we establish the law” was walking in step with the One Who said “keep my commandments.”

The conflict is not between Jesus and Paul. It is between Paul and the way he has been misread.

Further reading