Did Paul Invent Jesus's Divinity?

It is one of the most repeated moves in the popular case against Christianity: the divine Christ, it is said, is not the Jesus who taught in Galilee but a figure the apostle Paul built. On this telling a Jewish teacher was executed, his followers remembered him, and then Paul — an educated Pharisee who never walked with the earthly Jesus, at home in the Greek-speaking world — turned the man into a pre-existent, worshipped, cosmic Lord. Christianity, the slogan runs, is the religion about Jesus that Paul founded, not the religion of Jesus.

There is a great deal to test in that claim; this essay tests the narrow, load-bearing piece of it. Did Paul invent the confession of Jesus’s divinity? The answer the evidence returns is no — and it is Paul himself, more than anyone, who rules it out. He tells his readers, in so many words, that he received the core confession of the risen Christ rather than composed it. He never sets out to argue for Christ’s divine status; he everywhere assumes it, which is a stronger kind of evidence. When he reaches for language to describe Jesus, he reaches for the Old Testament’s own words for Yahweh. And he had been, by his own unembarrassed admission, the church’s violent persecutor before he was its apostle. A man does not invent, at the cost of everything he had, the very movement he was travelling to destroy.

The claim, stated fairly

The idea has a serious scholarly ancestor. A century ago the history-of-religions school argued that a “high” view of Jesus — pre-existent, divine, hailed as Kyrios (“Lord”) — could not have arisen among monotheistic Jews in Palestine; it must have drifted upward later, as the church moved out into the Greek world and absorbed the vocabulary of the pagan cults that hailed their gods as Kyrios.¹ Its popular descendant today is the developmental thesis of Bart Ehrman, who argues that the earliest followers held an “exaltation” Christology — God raised the man Jesus and adopted him to divine status — yet who also finds a pre-existent Christ already in material older than Paul, a figure he takes to have been conceived at first as a subordinate divine being — God’s chief angel, or a divinity of a lesser order — whose elevation to the co-equal God confessed at Nicaea in 325 is the later step, reaching its New Testament height in the latest Gospel, John.² On this view what developed was the divine figure’s rank, not the date of pre-existence itself. In the popular retelling that draws on both, Paul stands near the head of the trajectory — the earliest and most influential engine of the change.

Grant what is true in this, because a fair reply concedes the facts and refuses only the inference. The oldest datable Christian documents we possess are the letters of Paul, generally dated to the 50s of the first century — earlier than any of the Gospels. Paul did not walk with the earthly Jesus. And his Christology really is very high. None of that is in dispute. The question is whether Paul originated that Christology, or inherited and expressed it.

He says he received it, not invented it

Begin where Paul is most explicit that he is not the author. Around the year 55, in a letter to a quarrelsome church in Corinth, Paul paused to remind his readers of something he insists he did not invent. “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received,” he writes, “that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve” (1 Corinthians 15:3–5).³ The verbs are technical. Paul “delivered” (Greek paredōka) what he “received” (parelabon) — the precise idiom used in Judaism for the transmission of authoritative tradition, the equivalent of the rabbinic masar and qibbel.⁴ He is not narrating his own experience; he is handing on something handed to him.

And the tradition he hands on is old. Reckoning backward from the fixed points of Paul’s biography — his conversion within a few years of the crucifixion, his visit to Cephas and James in Jerusalem — the formula must predate Paul’s own receipt of it, which places its origin no later than the mid-to-late 30s — and within roughly two to five years of the crucifixion if he already had it at his conversion.⁵ This is not an apologetic estimate; it is held across the spectrum. The atheist New Testament scholar Gerd Lüdemann judged that “the elements in the tradition are to be dated to the first two years after the crucifixion… not later than three years”;⁶ the critical historian James Dunn writes that the formula “was formulated as tradition within months of Jesus’ death.”⁷ As N. T. Wright argues, this primitive tradition of the mid-30s reaches behind all our written Gospels to the foundation of the church’s faith.⁸ The full case for the date is laid out in our companion essay on the early creed of 1 Corinthians 15. What matters here is the posture: the confession Paul carries is one he tells us he inherited from those who were witnesses before him.

He assumes the divine confession — he never argues for it

The received creed of 1 Corinthians 15 is about the resurrection. Turn to the divinity itself, and the same pattern holds, more tellingly still. Across a decade and more of letters written to scattered churches to settle other questions — a collection here, a quarrel there, a word of comfort — Paul never sets out to prove that Christ is divine. He everywhere assumes it, and a thing presupposed offhandedly by a writer making some other point was not up for debate. In Colossians he can call Christ “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” — firstborn over creation, not first item within it — the one by whom “all things were created,” and say flatly that “in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily”⁹ — not as a thesis to be defended but as common ground from which to correct a local error. (Colossians’ own authorship is debated; but the same presupposing-not-arguing pattern runs through the undisputed letters — Philippians, 1 Corinthians, Romans — so the observation does not stand or fall with it.) This is Gordon Fee’s central exegetical observation about Paul: the startlingly high Christology is everywhere presupposed, never argued.¹⁰

And the pattern reaches behind Paul’s own letters. In Philippians he quotes what most scholars regard as a pre-Pauline hymn — material older than the letter itself — describing one who was “in the form of God” and did not count “equality with God” a thing to be grasped, and who took “the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men,” and is finally given “the name that is above every name.”¹¹ (The pre-Pauline dating is itself debated — Gordon Fee argues Paul composed the hymn — but the point stands either way: composed or quoted, the conviction it expresses is not one Paul argues into being.) Deeper still, Paul preserves an Aramaic prayer left untranslated in his Greek-speaking churches: Marana tha, “Our Lord, come!”¹² That the invocation survives in Aramaic is the point. It carries us back behind Paul’s Greek to the Aramaic-speaking Judean church — the very first community, already calling on the risen Jesus as the Lord who will come. The highest devotion is not a late overlay Paul introduced; it is bedrock beneath him.

He didn’t invent a new god — he put Jesus inside Israel’s God

Here the derivation-from-paganism thesis meets its hardest problem, and it is a problem of direction. When Paul reaches for language to describe the exalted Jesus, he does not reach outward to the mystery cults; he reaches into the Old Testament’s most jealously monotheistic texts — and applies to Jesus the words reserved for Yahweh alone. The climax of the Philippians hymn, “every knee should bow… every tongue confess,” is lifted from Isaiah 45, where the LORD swears that to him alone every knee shall bow — one of the most fiercely monotheistic passages in all of Scripture — and Paul applies it to Jesus. In Romans 10, having written that “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord… you will be saved,” he clinches the point by quoting Joel — “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” — a passage in which the Lord one calls upon is Yahweh himself.¹³ The same pattern runs through Paul’s ordinary pastoral language, where he is not arguing a point at all. Warning the Corinthians about idol food, he tells them that to wound a weaker believer is to “sin against Christ” (1 Corinthians 8:12); on its own that phrase proves little, but it belongs to a pattern. Two chapters later, retelling Israel’s rebellion in the wilderness, he warns them not to “test Christ, as some of them did” (10:9), and asks, “Are we trying to provoke the Lord to jealousy?” (10:22) — the Lord whose cup and table they share (10:21), in the language of Deuteronomy 32, where it is the LORD whom Israel provokes to jealousy with foreign gods (32:16, 21). And in his earliest surviving letter he asks the Father and Jesus together, with a single verb, to act: “May our God and Father Himself, and our Lord Jesus, direct our way to you” (1 Thessalonians 3:11). On McGrath’s reading (below) these would be the language of God’s agent; but the jealousy Israel provoked was the LORD’s alone, and Jewish piety characteristically did not address prayer, or prayer-wishes like this one, to an agent.¹⁴

This is what the British scholar Richard Bauckham calls including Jesus within the unique identity of the one God of Israel: Jesus is placed on the Creator’s side of the line that Jewish monotheism drew between God and everything else.¹⁵ It is a widely influential framing, though the divine-identity category is itself debated (Larry Hurtado read the same data as a pattern of devotion; James F. McGrath disputes the category). And it is the opposite of a pagan borrowing. A man importing a second god from the mystery religions does not reach for the chapter of Isaiah that most insists there is no god beside the LORD. The matrix is Jewish monotheism, not Hellenistic syncretism — which is why the older derivation-from-paganism model has largely collapsed under closer study. As Martin Hengel argued, more happened in Christology in the less than two decades between the crucifixion and Paul’s letters than in the seven centuries of doctrinal development that followed.¹⁶ The timeline is too fast, and the vocabulary too Jewish, for a slow drift out of paganism.

Exhibit A is Paul himself

There is one witness the inventor thesis has to explain, and it is the supposed inventor. Before he was the apostle Paul, he was Saul of Tarsus, and he was the church’s enemy. “I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it,” he reminds the Galatians; to the Philippians he lists his credentials with a kind of bitter pride: “as to zeal, a persecutor of the church” (Galatians 1:13; Philippians 3:6).¹⁷ This is not a hostile source describing Paul; it is Paul describing himself, in letters whose authenticity virtually all critical scholars accept. And Saul was no confused bystander. He grasped the claim that a crucified man was Israel’s Messiah, and he found it a scandal — for a hanged man was under God’s curse (Deuteronomy 21:23), and a crucified Messiah was a contradiction in terms to a first-century Pharisee.¹⁸

Then something reversed him. A movement’s enemies do not usually defect to it, at ruinous personal cost, on the strength of nothing. And the reversal is fatal to the thesis that Paul is the inventor, because it puts the causation backwards. You do not invent, at the cost of your standing and your safety and your inherited convictions, the very belief you had been trying to stamp out — a belief whose divine shape, as the Aramaic Marana tha and the hymn behind Philippians show, already reached back behind him. Whatever happened on the Damascus road, Paul did not build the confession of the risen, divine Christ. He joined it — and three years later stayed fifteen days with Cephas, the first name in the creed (Galatians 1:18).

The reply, and the concession

Honesty about scope keeps the argument sound, so state the concessions plainly. The developed creedal vocabulary came later＊What “developed later” meansIs sayingThe technical creedal vocabulary and systematic formulation (Nicaea’s “one essence,” Chalcedon’s “two natures”) came later, as the church’s articulation of what was already in the texts.Not sayingNot that the deity of Christ was a later human invention. The data — Jesus sharing God’s throne, name, and worship — is present from the earliest layers we can reach.: the fourth- and fifth-century language of “one essence” and “two natures” is a real achievement, the church’s articulation of what was already in the texts, not a first-century phrase. Paul himself insists the gospel he preached was “not man’s gospel” but came “through a revelation of Jesus Christ” (Galatians 1:11–12) — the text the inventor thesis leans on hardest. But what Paul says came by revelation is his encounter with the risen Son and his commission to the Gentiles (Galatians 1:15–16), not a creed of his own devising: the confession itself he says he “received” (1 Corinthians 15:3), and the message he preached was set before the leading men of the Jerusalem church, those who had known Jesus, and was endorsed by them rather than corrected (Galatians 2:2, 6, 9). Paul is, indeed, our earliest extensive Christian writer. And this essay does not, by itself, prove that the confession Paul received is true; that Paul handed on the belief that Jesus is the risen Lord establishes that the claim was made — at the movement’s foundation, by a formerly hostile witness — not that the claim is correct. Whether it is correct is the work of the resurrection evidence and of Jesus’s own words, argued elsewhere in this Library.

What the evidence does close off is the specific charge that Paul invented the divinity. The disagreement is not really about dates — Ehrman himself finds a pre-existent Christ in material older than Paul’s letters — but about what kind of being the earliest Christians took Jesus to be. In 1 Corinthians 8:6 Paul takes Israel’s own confession that the LORD is one and divides its two divine titles, so that the “one God” is the Father and the “one Lord” is Jesus Christ, “through whom are all things.” That reading of the verse is influential, arguably dominant, and genuinely contested: James F. McGrath argues that “one Lord” is set alongside the creed rather than folded into it. Read as folded into the creed, it is not one more step up a ladder. Wisdom is praised; Enoch is exalted; but no Jewish writer we know of wrote a second figure into the creed of divine uniqueness itself (Philo’s “second god,” the Logos, in Questions on Genesis 2.62, is the nearest case, and it is never placed inside that confession). Paul did. And whatever room Judaism had for exalted intermediaries, the angels among them characteristically refuse worship and redirect it to God, while the earliest Christians were praying to Jesus and singing hymns about him within the first two decades. Bauckham sharpens the point: the earliest Christians did not slowly climb a ladder from a low Christology to a high one; they expressed the highest possible claim — inclusion in the divine identity — from the start, using the very resources of Jewish monotheism.¹⁹ The words for it were refined over centuries; the reality is bedrock, and it is there in the earliest layer we can reach. Paul stands inside that layer, not above it.

Conclusion

So the honest answer to the question is no. Paul did not invent Jesus’s divinity. He is the single most important early witness to it — but a witness is precisely what he is: a man who received a confession, assumed it rather than argued it, clothed it in Israel’s own language for God, and embraced it only after it had overturned everything he believed. The sentence that frames his testimony to the risen Lord is the one he wrote to Corinth: “I delivered to you… what I also received.” The divine Christ was not Paul’s invention. He was the faith Paul was given — and had once tried to destroy. And this is what we hold to be true: the one Paul confessed as Lord is the eternal Son, fully God and fully man. This argument does not prove that; it clears the charge against it — the positive case rests on the resurrection and on Jesus’s own words.