For I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man's gospel.[c] 12 For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. (1:11-12)
Paul came through Galatia preaching the Gospel of justification by faith alone. The Judaizers, on the other hand, were teaching the Galatians that circumcision and keeping the Law were also necessary for salvation. Again, we aren't sure what Paul is responding to in this passage. However, it makes sense that for the Judaizers' false gospel to penetrate the Gentile churches, they would need to discredit the apostle appointed to preach to the Gentiles. Reading between the lines, it appears as though they attempted to drive a wedge between Paul and the twelve disciples in Jerusalem, who continued to minister primarily to the Jews there. They may also have tried to discredit his preaching by claiming ''his'' Gospel was the false one, since he never personally walked with Jesus, so he got his message secondhand, from men who distorted the message.
Aside from his apostolic credentials, Paul is the most influential theologian of the apostolic era. If you count words, he wrote over a quarter of the New Testament; his letters comprise over half the individual documents that make it up. Anyone who wants to undermine justification by faith has a serious hurdle to clear. And many individuals and organizations have tried to discredit the divine origin of Paul's teaching. I've often said that trying to set Paul apart from Jesus or the other disciples is prima facie evidence of apostasy, or well on its way.
The Ebionites were a second-century, heretical sect of Judaistic Christians. They claimed Jesus was a mere man whom God had selected to be the Messiah because he had obeyed the Law perfectly. Other than a revised version of the Gospel of Matthew, hey rejected the New Testament. Their canon of Scripture also included something called the "Ascents of James," which claimed Paul was a Gentile who converted to Judaism so he could marry the high priest's daughter. He became embittered when the high priest forbade the marriage, so he began railing against the Law and circumcision.
According to the Hadith (authoritative Islamic commentaries on the Quran): "I heard Allah's Apostle [Mohammed] saying, 'I am the nearest of all the people to the son of Mary, and all the prophets are paternal brothers, and there has been no prophet between me and him [Jesus]'" [Sahih al-Bukhari 4.55.651]). Christians are seen as followers of Paul, a false apostle who corrupted the pure (Islamic) religion of the Prophet Jesus. It's possible the Muslim view of Paul was taken from Ebionism.
Similarly, the Deists of the 17th and 18th centuries sometimes claimed that the ethical religion of Jesus had been corrupted by his followers. Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States and a Deist, published his own edition of the Bible, in which he literally cut and pasted the supposed pure religion of Jesus, separating it from the corruptions of the other biblical authors. In a letter to fellow Deist John Adams, he said they were "as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill."[1] Jefferson believed Paul was the villain of the Bible who had turned the religion
of Jesus into a religion
about Jesus.
In 1991, John Shelby Spong, then the very liberal Episcopalian bishop of Newark, wrote an influential and controversial book titled
Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, in which he defended every fashionable error of liberal biblical criticism of the past century. He argues about Paul, "No evidence points to any direct knowledge of the earthly Jesus on the part of this man. What he knew of Jesus he seems to have gotten through the oral tradition at the feet of itinerant preachers, from the various apostles, or from disciples of the apostles."[2] In the midst of this, he also tries to argue that Paul was a repressed homosexual who persecuted Christians to prove his masculinity to his fellow Jews. (Some people will say anything outrageous for press attention.)
We have a softer form of theological liberalism in the post-evangelical, progressive, "red-letter Christians." This movement, associated with the Evangelical left (in particular, Jim Wallis, Tony Campolo, and Shane Claiborne), claims Christians should pay closer attention to the words of Jesus, and the issues that he addressed directly should be our priorities for public policy. While not specifically repudiating the words of Paul as Spong does, the red-letter movement does imply that the words recorded as being spoken by Jesus are more inspired than the words spoken by other inspired messengers--and that issues not directly addressed by Jesus, such as homosexuality, which
Paul directly addresses, are of secondary importance. I doubt it's a coincidence that Campolo and Wallis are both in favour of same-sex marriage. Like the more traditional liberals of the last century, red-letter Christians are embarrassed by Paul.
Against those who would apparently drive a wedge between him and the rest of the apostles, Paul begins to defend his own apostolic authority. He tells us four things about his Gospel.
- First, it is not man's gospel. It did not have a human origin. He did not, as Spong put it, learn it secondhand at the feet of itinerant preachers or from the other apostles.
- Second and third, he did not receive it from any man, nor was [he] taught it. The difference between these two points is subtle, but I think the distinction Paul is making is that he was not merely handed a "gospel" by someone else and told to preach it, nor did he go through the labour of learning it through study.
- Fourth, he received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. Paul's Gospel was not the result of human impulse or learning; it was of direct divine origin, taught to him directly by the risen and ascended Jesus.
This is the thumbnail of Paul's credentials, which he defends in more detail in subsequent verses.
References
[1] Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 12 October 1813, Founders Online, accessed 3 May 2020,
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-06-02-0431.
[2] John Shelby Spong,
Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 100.