Paul Against James

Within twenty years of the crucifixion there were two Christianities, and they did not like each other.

One was in Jerusalem. It was led by James, the brother of Jesus, alongside Peter and John (Paul calls the three of them "the pillars"), and as far as we can reconstruct it, it was a movement within Judaism: Torah-observant, Temple-attending, circumcised, awaiting the return of a Messiah who had been executed by Rome. Its members had known Jesus personally. Some were related to him.

The other was being built across the eastern Mediterranean by Paul of Tarsus, a man who had never met Jesus, who had originally persecuted the movement, and who claimed his authority from a vision. His congregations were mostly gentile, they did not keep the Torah, the men were not circumcised, and they ate what they liked.

The second one won so completely that most Christians today do not know there was a fight. This chapter is about the fight, and about what the outcome determined, because almost everything Christianity became, including its portability into empire in chapter 5 and its silence on slavery in chapter 7, follows from which side lost.

The church we barely have

Reconstructing the Jerusalem community is hard, for a structural reason worth stating plainly: almost everything we have was written by the winners. Paul's letters are the earliest sources and they are one side of a dispute. Acts was written a generation later by an author who wanted to present the early church as harmonious, and who systematically softens the conflict Paul describes in his own hand. The Jewish-Christian groups that continued James's line survive mainly as summaries in the works of the heresy-hunters who were trying to eliminate them.¹

What can be said with confidence:

• James held authority in Jerusalem, and Paul (who is not generous to rivals) concedes it, describing his own trips to Jerusalem to have his mission validated.²
• James was executed in 62 CE, on the initiative of the high priest Ananus during a gap between Roman governors. Josephus reports it and records that observant Jews in the city objected to the illegality of the proceeding, a detail that tells you James was regarded as a pious Jew, not as an apostate.³
• The community expected members to keep the law. That was not a faction's eccentricity; it was the default of the movement Jesus had actually led.

A memory of the man himself survives at second hand. Hegesippus, a second-century Christian writer preserved only in Eusebius's quotations, describes James as an ascetic of lifelong vows, admitted to the sanctuary, his knees calloused like a camel's from constant prayer in the Temple, and known to the whole city as "the Just".⁴ The portrait is stylised and a century late, and should be handled as legend. But the direction of the legend is itself evidence: nobody remembered the brother of Jesus as the founder of a new religion. They remembered a righteous man of Israel, praying in the Temple of Israel, while Paul reorganised the movement's periphery.

One more source fact, because the shelf order of the New Testament conspires against it: the gospels stand first in the book and were written last. Paul's letters were written first, in the 50s, before any surviving narrative of Jesus's life existed, and every gospel was composed inside a movement his mission had already reshaped. The dispute this chapter describes happened before the record, and the record was made by the side that won it.

What the fight was about

On the surface, a question of admissions policy: does a gentile who joins this Jewish messianic movement have to become a Jew (circumcision, food laws, calendar) or not?

Underneath, three much larger questions. Who decides: the men who knew Jesus, or a man with a vision? What is the movement: the renewal of Israel, or a new thing for everybody? And what is the death of Jesus for: a scandal to be vindicated when God restores Israel, or a universal atoning mechanism that makes the law obsolete?

Two episodes carry the whole dispute.

The Jerusalem meeting. Paul's version (Galatians 2) and Acts' version (Acts 15) disagree in instructive ways. In Paul, he goes up "in response to a revelation", lays his gospel before the leadership privately, confronts "false brothers secretly brought in", and reports with studied contempt that "those reputed to be something" added nothing to him; he is grudgingly recognised, and is asked only to "remember the poor": that is, to keep sending money. In Acts, a council convenes, Peter and Paul give harmonious speeches, James presides genially, and a compromise decree goes out imposing a short list of rules on gentile converts: abstain from meat sacrificed to idols, from blood, from strangled animals and from sexual immorality. Acts is writing decades later, with an interest in showing an untroubled apostolic consensus. Paul is writing in the heat of it, to a congregation he is furious with, and his account is jagged, defensive and much more believable as testimony to a real conflict.⁵

There is a further oddity that cuts in Paul's favour. When idol meat actually becomes an issue at Corinth, Paul argues it out from first principles across three chapters and never once cites the decree Acts says had settled the matter, and says Paul himself helped deliver. Either the decree did not yet exist, or it did not run in Paul's churches; both possibilities say there was no settlement, only two missions with a contested treaty line between them.⁶

The row at Antioch. This is the moment the mask comes off. Peter had been eating with gentile believers. Then "certain men came from James," and Peter withdrew, and, Paul says bitterly, even Barnabas was carried away. Paul says he opposed Peter to his face in public.⁷ The stakes were not table manners: the shared meal was the act that constituted the community, and separate tables meant two churches in one city. Notice also the mechanics of authority in the scene: a message from James, in Jerusalem, is enough to move Peter, the senior disciple of Jesus, in Antioch. Paul does not tell us who won. Given that he tells us in detail whenever he wins, the silence is loud, and many scholars read it as the point where Paul lost Antioch and Barnabas, and struck out west on his own.

The money

One thread runs through the whole dispute and is usually left out of the retelling, because it is about money. The one concrete obligation Paul concedes the pillars laid on him was to "remember the poor", and he spent much of his last decade doing exactly that: organising a collection from his gentile congregations for Jerusalem. He gives the Corinthians banking instructions (set something aside on the first day of every week); he devotes two chapters of fundraising rhetoric to it in a later letter; and in Romans he states the theory outright: the gentiles have shared in the Jews' spiritual blessings, therefore they owe them material ones.⁸

Read politically, the collection is tribute: an acknowledgement in coin that Jerusalem was the mother assembly, from a man who elsewhere insists he owed the pillars nothing. And Paul knew the payment might be refused; in the same passage of Romans he asks for prayers "that my service for Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints", which is not a sentence you write about money you are confident will be taken. Acts, which narrates his final journey to Jerusalem in detail, never quite says the collection was accepted; the arrival is followed instead by warnings that law-zealous believers think Paul teaches apostasy from Moses, and by the Temple riot that ends his freedom. In a book devoted to harmony, the missing receipt is one more loud silence.

Why Paul won

Not because he was right, and not because he was more popular in his lifetime. He won for reasons that are almost entirely structural, which is the argument of chapter 1 applied to a religious movement.

The competition was destroyed. James was killed in 62; Paul and Peter, by the usual reckoning, died in Rome at about the same time. Then, in 66–70 CE, the Judaean revolt ended with Jerusalem sacked and the Temple burned. The Jerusalem church lost its city, its Temple, its leadership and its authority within a single decade. A later tradition says the community fled to Pella across the Jordan before the siege; the story is disputed, and either way the centre of gravity was gone.⁹ Paul's congregations, scattered through Asia Minor, Greece and Rome, were untouched. Death decapitated the Jerusalem movement, which ran on personal authority in one place; it barely slowed Paul's, which ran on letters that could be copied.

His product travelled and theirs did not. Torah observance is demanding: adult circumcision, dietary law, sabbath, festival calendar, and a social separation from the surrounding city. Paul's offer removed the entry cost while keeping the goods: a moral community, a resurrection promise, a God of the whole world. It also opened the movement to two groups already at the synagogue door: the "God-fearers", gentiles attached to Jewish congregations without converting, and women, for whom a movement without circumcision had an obvious structural symmetry.

He wrote, and the roads were Roman. Paul's missionary strategy is a map of empire: he worked the ports and provincial capitals of the Roman road and shipping network, and he held the congregations together with letters. Those letters became the earliest Christian canon. The Jerusalem leadership, operating face to face in one city, left no comparable archive. The empire that killed Jesus supplied the distribution network that spread the version of him that would eventually rule it.

His name kept writing after his death. Thirteen letters in the New Testament carry Paul's name. The critical consensus is that seven are certainly his (Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon) and that the rest were composed by followers writing in his name, some of them decades later.¹⁰ For this chapter's argument the forgeries matter as much as the originals: within a generation "Paul" had become the franchise under which Christian instruction was issued, a brand worth counterfeiting. The other side had no such engine. One short letter under the name of James, and one under Jude, "brother of James", is the entire surviving literary estate of the family of Jesus.

Then Rome removed the alternative twice more. The fiscus Judaicus after 70, a punitive tax on Jews across the empire, made the boundary of Jewishness a fiscal question, and gave gentile Christians a standing incentive to define themselves as emphatically not that. The crushing of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 132–135 finished the job: Jerusalem was rebuilt as a pagan colony, Jews were barred from it, and a Christianity that was also a Judaism became, in Roman eyes, doubly suspect. The severing Paul's opponents had feared became a fact on the ground, enforced by a state indifferent to either party's theology.

What lost, and what it believed

The Jewish-Christian traditions did not vanish overnight. The Ebionites (the name comes from the Hebrew for "the poor", plausibly the same poor Paul was collecting for) are described by their opponents as holding that Jesus was a man, born normally, chosen at his baptism; that the law remained binding; and, tellingly, that Paul was an apostate. They used a gospel of their own, now lost except for hostile quotation, and they persisted for centuries at the margins of the empire.¹¹ The Nazarenes appear in similar reports. The Pseudo-Clementine literature preserves what looks like a Jewish-Christian narrative in which a figure standing for Paul is the villain.¹² The mirror image is exact: in these communities' memory, Paul held the place that Judas holds in the winners'.

Two cautions. We know these groups almost exclusively through hostile summaries, and heresy-hunters were not reliable ethnographers. And it is genuinely uncertain how continuous they were with James's Jerusalem church. But the shape of what was lost is visible: a Christianity that stayed inside Judaism, treated Jesus as a human messiah rather than a pre-existent divine being, and kept the ethical-legal apparatus of Torah, including, and this matters for chapter 7, the jubilee, debt release, sabbath rest and gleaning rights, a body of law that at least attempted to limit accumulation.

The consequences that run through this chronicle

Christianity became portable, and therefore adoptable. A universal, law-free, ethnically unbounded religion is exactly the sort of thing an empire can take over and use. A Torah-observant messianic sect inside Judaism is not. Chapter 5 is only possible because chapter 4 ended the way it did.

The New Testament's table of contents is the victory, memorialised. Thirteen letters under Paul's name against one under James's; the story of the period told by Acts, a book whose whole design is to make Peter and Paul interchangeable; the winner's letters canonised as scripture and the loser's theology surviving chiefly as the thing those letters argue against. A reader who takes the book's proportions for the period's proportions will conclude that Paul was early Christianity. That is not a reading of the evidence; it is the evidence's shape, and the shape was made by the outcome. Chapter 6 shows the same mechanism at the scale of the whole canon.

The break with Judaism began here. Paul was arguing inside his own family, as a Jew; but once his side won and gentiles were the majority, his polemics against "the law" were read as polemics against a foreign people. Within a century the logic reached its terminus in Marcion, who declared the God of Israel a different and lesser being from the Father of Jesus, and proposed a scripture of nothing but Paul and an edited Luke. The church expelled him, but answered him with a Paul-first canon of its own (chapter 6 tells that story). The road from an internal argument to Christian antisemitism runs through the loss of the Jewish side of the movement.

The household codes entered scripture. The letters that carried the day contain instructions to slaves to obey their masters, and Paul's own letter to Philemon sends a runaway slave back to his owner. The authorship of some of these passages is disputed (Colossians and Ephesians are widely regarded as later, written in Paul's name), but that hardly helps: it means the household codes were being inserted into the canon as it formed, in the generation after Paul, by a movement settling into the social order of the empire.¹⁴ Fourteen centuries later those verses were still doing their work in the Atlantic. Chapters 7 and 8 take that up.

The movement of an executed Galilean, run by his brother in the city where he died, lost. The movement of a Greek-writing Roman citizen who never met him, addressed to the cities of the empire that killed him, won. Three centuries later that empire made it official.

Footnotes

1. On the historiographical problem, Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), chs. 1–5. On Acts as a harmonising narrative, Ernst Haenchen, The Acts of the Apostles: A Commentary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1971). ↩
2. Galatians 1:18–19, 2:1–10. ↩
3. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities XX.197–203. See John Painter, Just James: The Brother of Jesus in History and Tradition, 2nd ed. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004). ↩
4. Hegesippus, quoted in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History II.23. ↩
5. Galatians 2:1–10 against Acts 15:1–29; the decree at Acts 15:19–21, 28–29. The classic statement of the tension is F. C. Baur's, in Paul, the Apostle of Jesus Christ (1845); modern treatments are less schematic but the discrepancy is not disputed. ↩
6. 1 Corinthians 8–10; Acts 15:22–29 and 16:4 on Paul delivering the decree. On the problem, James D. G. Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), on the Jerusalem council and its aftermath. ↩
7. Galatians 2:11–14. ↩
8. Galatians 2:10; 1 Corinthians 16:1–4; 2 Corinthians 8–9; Romans 15:25–31; the faint trace of the delivery at Acts 24:17. On the collection's politics, Dunn, Beginning from Jerusalem, and Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans' Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). ↩
9. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History III.5.3, on the flight to Pella; for the sceptical case, Gerd Lüdemann, "The Successors of Pre-70 Jerusalem Christianity," in E. P. Sanders (ed.), Jewish and Christian Self-Definition, vol. 1 (London: SCM, 1980), pp. 161–173. ↩
10. For the consensus on the seven undisputed letters and the disputed rest, Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1997); Bart D. Ehrman, Forged (New York: HarperOne, 2011). ↩
11. Irenaeus, Against Heresies I.26.2; Epiphanius, Panarion 30, which also quotes the so-called Gospel of the Ebionites. For a careful modern reconstruction, Oskar Skarsaune and Reidar Hvalvik (eds.), Jewish Believers in Jesus (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2007). ↩
12. See F. Stanley Jones, Pseudoclementina Elchasaiticaque inter Judaeochristiana (Leuven: Peeters, 2012). ↩
13. E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977); Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans' Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). ↩
14. Colossians 3:22–4:1; Ephesians 6:5–9; 1 Timothy 6:1–2; Titus 2:9–10; 1 Peter 2:18. On authorship, Bart D. Ehrman, Forged (New York: HarperOne, 2011). On the codes as accommodation to Greco-Roman household order, David L. Balch, Let Wives Be Submissive (Chico: Scholars Press, 1981). ↩