On Jesus and Paul-ianity

I was talking with a friend a while ago who told me that he was trying to come to a more mature understanding of the Christian faith. He held that that Christianity as we know it today has more to do with Paul than Christ, and he wanted to get back to the historical Jesus. I've heard this claim before. Just the other day I heard a man on CBC Radio opine that instead of Christianity, the faith should be called "Paul-ianity."

I didn't have time to get into it with my friend, but this is what I would have said if I did.

The question we have to ask of the "more Paul than Jesus" argument is just this: how do we know anything at all about the historical Jesus? The answer, of course (especially if you've already ruled out the living presence of the risen Jesus in the community of faith) is that we're dependent on the historical record-- the things the earliest Christians wrote down about what they believed Jesus said, and did, and was.

But once we admit we're dependent on the historical record, we have to grapple with three pretty significant issues. First, even if we read the gospels as strictly history, they're still an historical interpretation of Jesus, as much an interpretation as Paul's. Second, though the gospels are certainly historical, they are not "strictly" history in the modern sense. Their genre is actually much more fluid than that. Finally (and this is big), as historical documents, Paul's letters are actually among the earliest writings we have in the historical record (compare AD 48-51 for the earliest letter to say AD 60 for the earliest gospel).

The question then becomes: why privilege the gospels over Paul's letters as historical documents about Jesus?

Think about it like this: When I was in High School, I was an exchange student in Quebec. During those months away, I wrote a shoe-box-full of love letters home to my girlfriend. She's now my wife, and has the shoe-box somewhere in our basement. Suppose that now, about 15 years later, an observer of our long-distance relationship—my brother maybe—writes a biographical novel about my time in Quebec. We’d have essentially two historical records: a box of letters written during the events in question, and an historical novel written later, based on what an observer remembers.

The question then becomes: which of the two would offer a more useful picture about our relationship during the Quebec-separation years? The analogy is admittedly very limited and simplified, but this is somewhat the same situation we have when we look at the historical record of Jesus.

Paul had no doubt that his message was consistent with the apostolic tradition about Jesus; he also insisted that he had received it from the living Lord Himself, not from any man. Maybe better than privileging the red letters over the black in our modern editions of the good book, we should ask: what are we missing in our readings of both Paul and the gospels that would help us hear the harmony in the apparent discord of their interpretations of Jesus?