Was Paul Really an Apostle?

Last updated on: August 18, 2023 at 1:58 pm by Lynn Michael Martin

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Was Paul Really an Apostle? 2023-08-18T13:58:46-04:00 Lynn Michael Martin

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Recently, I interacted with someone who believes that the apostle Paul was not really an apostle. He argued that the earliest Christians didn’t accept Paul’s authority.

Views like this one seem to have become more popular recently—it seems like many people would rather not listen to Paul. But in fact, this is a new view. Actually, the early church believed that Paul was an apostle and had authority. In this article, I’ll cite some of the evidence.

Three of the earliest church fathers call Paul an apostle

Polycarp, who knew the apostle John, calls Paul an apostle in chapter 9 of Polycarp’s letter to the Philippians. 1 Clement (a book probably written by one or more people who knew Peter and Paul) calls Paul an apostle (ch. 47). Ignatius, who quite possibly knew the apostle John, calls Paul an apostle when writing to the church in Rome (ch. 4). He also calls Paul “holy” when writing to the church in Ephesus (ch. 12).

In response to this evidence, my interlocutor argued that we don’t have the original of Polycarp’s letter, and that there’s a chance that statement wasn’t originally written by Polycarp. He also cited a theory from the 1800s, which proposes that the epistles of Ignatius weren’t really authentic. Instead, the idea is that they were written by Callixtus, bishop of Rome, in order to prove the monarchical episcopate (the practice of having a single bishop as the head of each church).

This theory on the origin of Ignatius’s letters seems very sketchy, and I’m not aware that scholars consider it a live option today. In fact, Ignatius never even mentions a bishop in Rome, so if Ignatius was actually Callixtus demonstrating his authority, he sure bungled it.

Finally, while there may be room to dispute either the references from Polycarp, Clement, or Ignatius individually, surely a theory that requires all three of those references to be spurious is highly unlikely.

All the evidence from the first century shows that Paul was on good terms with the twelve apostles

But we actually have good evidence from Scripture itself that Paul was an apostle. The book of Acts depicts Paul as on good terms with the twelve apostles. In the book of 2 Peter, the apostle Peter writes highly of Paul. And in Galatians, Paul recounts meeting with Peter, John, and James, who confirmed that Paul was teaching the same gospel as they were.

My interlocutor objected to Galatians by saying that we can’t use Paul’s writings to prove his authenticity. However, we can. There’s no way Paul could have claimed to be teaching the same gospel as the twelve if in fact he wasn’t. Paul wrote to churches that had interaction with the twelve, yet he never explicitly disagrees with them in doctrine, and they never write against him. If he had really been teaching false doctrine, he would have been one of the biggest threats the church faced, and yet we never hear of the twelve, later church leaders, etc., writing against Paul.

My interlocutor objected to 2 Peter, saying that it doesn’t really support Paul, because Peter says that Paul can be hard to understand. However, Peter was not damning Paul with faint praise, as my interlocutor suggested. In fact, Peter says that those who find false doctrines in Paul are ignorant and unstable.

And in response to Acts, my interlocutor argued that Peter and James were simply loving Paul as an enemy, not supporting his mission. However, the apostles never “loved their enemies” by ignoring false doctrine for a moment. They rejected false doctrine and never once allowed politeness to make it sound like they were accepting it.

Conclusion

The fact remains that the early church was unanimous in its agreement that Paul was an apostle. Jesus, the twelve, Paul, and the Christian leaders of the first centuries all taught the same gospel. Because Paul’s writings are easy to misunderstand, it is easy for people to try to drive wedges between him and the rest of the apostles, but that doesn’t mean they were teaching different things.

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