Paul’s Argument
~ Monday, February 18, 2019 ~
Paul is the most prolific author in the New Testament. He is also the apostle who devoted the largest portion of his writing to defending his right to write it. The defense in Galatians is not rhetorical modesty. It is a response to a specific charge, addressed to a specific audience, and its existence tells us something about the apostolic category that the canonical narrative does not state directly.
Galatians opens with a credential claim. The first sentence — “Paul, an apostle — not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father” — is polemical in form. It is an assertion framed against a denial. Someone has said, or Paul believes someone has said, that his apostolic authority is derivative: that he received it from men, through a human chain of authorization, and is therefore secondary to those who stand closer to the original source.
The rest of the first two chapters of Galatians is his answer.
The argument from revelation
In Galatians 1:11–12, Paul states that the gospel he preached “is not of human origin” and that he “did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.” In 1:15–17, he describes the aftermath of his conversion: he did not go to Jerusalem, he did not consult with “those who were apostles before me.” He went to Arabia first, and then to Damascus.
The phrase “those who were apostles before me” is notable. It acknowledges that others held the category first — their priority is not in dispute. What Paul is denying is their authority over him, and the grounds for that denial is the directness of his own commissioning.
Three years after the conversion, he did go to Jerusalem, briefly, to visit Peter. He saw no one else among the apostles, he writes, “except James the Lord’s brother.” This parenthetical note — naming as an apostle someone who is not among the synoptic Twelve — is itself evidence of how permeable the category was in practice.
The private meeting and its limits
Fourteen years later, Paul returned to Jerusalem and laid out his gospel privately to the “pillar” apostles — James, Peter, and John. They “perceived the grace given to me” and offered him the right hand of fellowship. No conditions were imposed; no revision was required.
Paul presents this as confirmation. But confirmation is not the same as original commissioning, and the meeting was private rather than a public endorsement before the community. Paul had been preaching for fourteen years before this gathering occurred; it took place on his terms, at his initiative, and he frames it throughout as the recognition of something already accomplished rather than the authorization of something pending.
The confrontation at Antioch, recounted immediately after in Galatians 2:11–14, complicates the picture further. When Peter arrived and began withdrawing from table fellowship with Gentile believers under pressure from a group “from James,” Paul “withstood him to his face, because he was to be blamed.” The most prominent of the original apostles, publicly corrected by a later arrival, for inconsistency with an agreement they had just reached. Apostolic authority, in this account, was personal, practical, and subject to contest between individuals.
The abnormal birth
In 1 Corinthians 15:8–11, Paul lists the resurrection appearances: to Peter, to the Twelve, to five hundred, to James, to “all the apostles,” and then: “last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.” The Greek word is ektrōma — untimely birth, or miscarriage. A harsh word for self-description.
Paul may be reclaiming a term his opponents used against him. What follows — “I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle” — is immediately countered by “but I worked harder than all of them.” The self-deprecation and the assertion arrive in the same breath. One does not write this way about a settled question.
The rhetorical question in 1 Corinthians 9:1 is unambiguous in its structure: “Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” Questions of this form answer an implied accusation. The implied accusation is that the answer is no.
What the argument demonstrates
If the category of apostle had been definitively closed, institutionally fixed, and uncontestable by the time Paul was writing — roughly 50–55 CE — the defense in Galatians would not have been necessary. The opponents who challenged Paul in Galatia had standing to challenge him; that they had standing means the question was open. A closed institution does not require this kind of argument.
The argument exists. It is long, careful, and repeated across multiple letters to multiple communities. This is not the behavior of someone defending a position that everyone concedes. It is the behavior of someone defending a position that is genuinely in dispute.
The argument is the evidence.
In this series
- The Lists That Don’t Agree
- The Seventy and the Problem of Names
- What Nag Hammadi Did to the Record
- The Number Beyond the Count
- The Missions North of the Danube
Sources
- Galatians 1–2; 1 Corinthians 9:1–2; 15:1–11 (primary texts). Nestle-Aland, Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th edition (Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2012).
- Betz, Hans Dieter. Galatians: A Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Churches in Galatia. Hermeneia Commentary Series. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979.
- Acts 15 (primary text, Jerusalem Council).