Paul: Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity?

NO OF PAGES: 452 SUB CAT I: Paul SUB CAT II: SUB CAT III: DESCRIPTION: David Wenham has returned with new vigor to the old question of the relationship of Pauline thought to the life and teachings of Jesus. His work is the most extensive treatment of this subject currently available and as such demands the attention of every scholar even remotely interested in this subject. Wenham's well-argued case for significant unity between the Jesus and Pauline traditions needs to be heard, not least because he has made a strong case that Paul was a follower of the Christ, not a founder of Christianity.NOTES: SUBTITLE:

I have bought this book some time back, and have decided to read it in a bid to understand the arguments regarding the issue of Paul and Jesus. The author has done a good job of utilizing the evidence, textual and otherwise, to prove his conservative position on this issue, and thus show that even by the standards of modernist scholarship, a reasonably good case can be made of the essential continuity between Jesus and Paul.

What erodes the usefulness of this book and undermines its case however, is the wholesale capitulation to the prevailing "scholarly" paradigm of Modernism especially in this case Higher Criticism. The entire humanistic presuppositions behind Modernist "theo"-logy is assumed to be correct even though there is no rationale (and no proof) for why such is so. The author's case thus utilizes the Modernist hermeneutic of unbelief, instead of the Biblical hermeneutic of Sola Scriptura and the epistemic primacy of Scripture. This can be seen for example in this statement found early in the book: "We cannot take for granted in this study that the Gospels' description of Jesus is historically accurate in all points" (p. 20). Presumably, the Modernists do not find it strange that they can take for granted "in this study" that Rationalism and Empiricism (both used in the process of Higher Criticism) can discover historically accurate proof - a logically fallacious enterprise. Rather than begin with the Truth of Revelation and deduce truths from there, they rather commit intellectual suicide through embracing the logically fallacious and cognitively vacuous process of rationalist and/or empiricist "historical accurate proof". Thus they prove the Scriptures correct as stated in Rom. 1:21-22 - that in their rejection of God's truth and in professing to be wise, they in actual fact become fools; exchanging the glory of God for the image of "god" they create through their historical and textual deconstruction. It would be much better for them to decontruct their own skepticism and humanism instead. ( )