Was Jesus trying to reform Judaism from the inside — and did Paul accidentally start a whole new religion Jesus never intended?

• Z

  Zara1mo ago

  This is the question I've been afraid to ask out loud in my church for fifteen years. Jesus never said 'start a new religion.' He said 'I came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it.' Paul said the law is a curse. Those are not the same man saying the same thing.

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• QM

  Quinn M.1mo ago

  My grandfather was a pastor for forty years, very conservative, very Paul-heavy in his preaching. On his deathbed he told me he wished he had preached more of the actual words of Jesus. I'm not saying Paul is wrong. I'm saying maybe there's a corrective needed and even faithful believers inside the tradition sometimes feel it.

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• SR

  Sam R.1mo ago

  i grew up in a very paul-heavy church. romans, galatians, ephesians every single week. i could tell you paul's theology backward. then i actually read the gospels slowly for the first time at 32 and i genuinely cried because i felt like i had never met Jesus. like actually met him. that scared me.

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• S

  Sam1mo ago

  You know what I'm tired of? Every time someone raises a genuinely hard question about Paul, someone screams 'Marcionite!' and someone else screams 'you're ignoring Scripture!' Neither of those is an argument. Neither is engagement. They're just ways of ending conversations that the faith is actually big enough to have.

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• R

  Ravi1mo ago

  I'm Jewish. Not Christian. I study this period academically. For what it's worth, most Jewish scholars who read the Sermon on the Mount don't find anything in it that couldn't have been said by a first-century Jewish teacher. When you get to Paul's Letter to the Galatians, you're in genuinely different theological territory. That's not an attack on Paul. It's just the history.

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• R

  Ravi1mo ago

  If you disagree that Paul added something genuinely new to what Jesus taught, I want you to find me one place in the four Gospels where Jesus explains his own death as a substitutionary atonement. One place. Where Jesus says 'I am dying to satisfy God's justice on your behalf.' I'll wait. Because Paul builds an entire theology on it. Jesus in the Gospels talks about the cross constantly — but not usually in those terms.

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• N

  Nina1mo ago

  Hard disagree. Paul met the risen Christ on the road to Damascus. If you trust that encounter, Paul isn't freelancing — he's reporting. You can't say 'I believe in the resurrection' and then act like Jesus went silent the moment He ascended.

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• M

  Marco1mo ago

  Okay but be honest: if you removed every book Paul wrote from the New Testament, Protestant soteriology basically evaporates. Justification by faith alone? Gone. Imputed righteousness? Gone. The sinners prayer? Gone. What you're left with is a Jewish teacher who healed people and told parables. That's not nothing, but it IS a different religion than what most American evangelicals actually practice.

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• L

  Leo1mo ago

  Jefferson also owned slaves, so I'm not sure he's the authority I want on reconstructing authentic Christianity.

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• A

  Alex1mo ago

  Genuine question for anyone saying they're the same: how do you handle the dietary laws? Jesus says nothing to abolish them explicitly. Peter gets a vision. Paul says everything is clean. Were those three men all receiving the same revelation, or was the goalposts moving in real time and we've all agreed not to notice?

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• Z

  Zara1mo ago

  Mark 10:45. 'The Son of Man came to give his life as a ransom for many.' That's Jesus. In the Gospels. You're welcome.

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• AT

  Alex T.1mo ago

  The Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 is the most underrated chapter in the entire New Testament. The apostles — Peter, James, the OG guys — basically said the Gentiles don't have to become Jews to be saved. That's not Paul hijacking anything. That's the original leadership agreeing with him. Case closed for me.

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• L

  Leo1mo ago

  my pastor would never let this question get asked in sunday school and honestly that makes me more suspicious not less

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• F9

  Feli 921mo ago

  Actually there's a strong scholarly argument that the letter of James is SPECIFICALLY written as a corrective to misreadings of Paul — or possibly Paul himself. 'Faith without works is dead' reads differently if you know someone is out there teaching 'by faith ALONE.' James might be the first intra-Christian theological pushback in recorded history.

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• KL

  Kofi L.1mo ago

  Sawing the canon in half is exactly what Marcion did in the second century. He loved Paul, hated the Jewish God of the Old Testament, and threw out everything that connected them. The church called that heresy. If your 'Jesus vs. Paul' framework makes you start sounding like Marcion, pump the brakes.

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• F_

  Feli _x1mo ago

  The problem with 'it's just translation' is that Paul doesn't translate Jesus, he interprets him. Heavily. Theologically. With categories Jesus never used — like 'justification,' 'propitiation,' 'in Christ.' These aren't translations. They're a whole framework built on top of something that was already complete.

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• L

  Leo1mo ago

  I want to push back on the idea that Jesus 'never intended' a new religion. In Matthew 16 he literally says 'I will build my church.' He commissions the disciples to 'make disciples of all nations.' He doesn't say 'reform the synagogue system.' He says go everywhere, teach everything, baptize everyone. That sounds like a new movement to me.

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  Theo1mo ago

  Mark 7:19 — 'Thus he declared all foods clean.' That's Jesus. That's not Paul. So before we crown Paul the innovator on food laws, maybe read the Gospels.

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• R

  Riley1mo ago

  Using 'that sounds like Marcion' as a conversation stopper is lazy theology. You can note genuine tensions between Jesus and Paul without going full Marcion. The tension IS the conversation.

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• Q

  Quinn1mo ago

  Acts 15 is Paul's version of Acts 15. Or Luke's. Neither of whom were exactly neutral parties in this dispute. The letter Paul wrote to the Galatians suggests that whatever settlement was reached in Jerusalem didn't actually stick, because he spent chapters ripping into Peter for flip-flopping. You don't do that if everyone calmly agreed.

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• QT

  Quinn T.1mo ago

  The word translated 'church' in Matthew 16 is 'ekklesia' — a Greek word that just means 'assembly' or 'gathering.' It was already used in the Greek Old Testament for the assembly of Israel. Jesus using it doesn't automatically mean 'start a new institution separate from Judaism.' That's a projection backward from what the church eventually became.

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• K

  Kofi1mo ago

  The vision in Acts 10 isn't actually about food. It's about Gentiles. Peter himself interprets it that way. People keep taking it as dietary law commentary when Peter literally says 'God has shown me I should not call any man common or unclean.' Read the whole chapter.

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• J

  Jordan1mo ago

  The canon is the canon. You don't get to weight some books as more 'Jesus-y' than others. The moment you start deciding which parts of Scripture to privilege over others, you've made yourself the authority — not God. That's the oldest mistake in the book and it doesn't get more sophisticated just because you frame it as 'getting back to Jesus.'

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• OK

  Omar K.1mo ago

  I think what happens is this: Jesus came to Israel. Paul went to everyone else. They were doing genuinely different jobs in genuinely different contexts. Of course the message gets packaged differently. That's not contradiction, that's translation.

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• M

  Morgan1mo ago

  What you're calling 'a different religion' is what Jesus himself called the fulfillment of all prophecy. The categories you're imposing are modern. Nobody in the first century was sitting there going 'is this Judaism or Christianity?' That distinction took decades to harden.

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• JL

  Jamie L.1mo ago

  Mark 7:19 has a parenthetical note that most scholars believe was added by the author, not spoken by Jesus. The original Greek is awkward in a way that suggests editorial comment. If you disagree with that, explain why Matthew's parallel account — same incident — doesn't include it.

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• FT

  Feli T.1mo ago

  The question is valid but the framing privileges a false binary. 'Jesus reformed Judaism' vs 'Paul invented Christianity' — these aren't the only options. A third option: the Spirit was doing something genuinely new through both of them, continuous with Israel's story but not reducible to it. The early church didn't pick one of them and throw out the other. Why should we?

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  Marco1mo ago

  If Paul 'invented' Christianity, someone needs to explain why James — the actual brother of Jesus, the guy who literally grew up in the same house — wrote a letter that sounds suspiciously like Pauline theology in several key places. The people closest to Jesus weren't running around saying 'wait, who is this Paul and why is he changing everything.'

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  Avery1mo ago

  With all due respect, that Jewish academic framing has its own agenda too. The question isn't whether Jesus sounds like a Jewish teacher — he obviously did, he was one — the question is whether his death and resurrection changed the terms of everything. Paul says yes. The resurrection doesn't let us keep playing by the old categories.

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• R9

  Ravi 921mo ago

  Every single writer in every single corpus builds frameworks. Matthew builds one. John builds one. Luke builds one. Why does Paul get singled out as suspect for doing what ALL the NT authors did? Answer: because we absorbed Protestant suspicion of tradition and Catholic authority, and Paul is the easiest target.

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  Iris1mo ago

  The framing of this question is already loaded. 'Paul accidentally started a new religion' — accidentally? The man was a trained Pharisee who said he received his gospel by direct revelation. Accidental is not the word for anything Paul did.

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• J

  Jamie1mo ago

  Thomas Jefferson literally cut out all of Paul and all the miracles from his Bible and kept just Jesus's moral teachings. So there's a long American tradition of this exact question. Doesn't make Jefferson right, just means you're in good company asking it.

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• F

  Feli1mo ago

  Okay that reply made me actually laugh out loud. Fair point though.

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• H

  Hana1mo ago

  Nope. Hard disagree with the premise. Jesus IS the fulfillment Paul preaches. You can't separate them without sawing the canon in half.

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