Christian missionaries everywhere make the same handful of claims about Paul again and again. Each answer below is short, and each links to the article that sets out the full evidence.
Was Paul an apostle of Jesus? #
Paul never met ʿĪsā ibn Maryam ʿalayhi al-salām, peace be upon him during his life. His claim rests on a vision near Damascus, which the only narrative source tells three times with contradictory details.1 The men who had walked with ʿĪsā ibn Maryam never granted him the standing he claimed for himself.
Full evidence: The Damascus road: one vision, three stories
Did Muslim scholars accept Paul as a disciple? #
The claim rests on a few histories that list Paul’s name among early Christian figures. The scholars who examined his teaching judged him the corrupter of the religion of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam, from Khushaysh ibn Aṣram in the ninth century to ʿAbd al-Jabbār in the tenth and Isma’il R. al Faruqi in the twentieth.
Full evidence: The early Islamic record
Did more than five hundred people see the risen Jesus? #
Only Paul says so, and he was not there. The claim is prima facie weighty and, on inspection, unwitnessed.2 No Gospel records the event, and Paul names none of the five hundred.
Full evidence: Five hundred witnesses and an angel of light
Did Paul and the disciples teach the same gospel? #
Paul’s own letter records him opposing Peter to his face at Antioch.3 In Islamicjerusalem, James had to instruct him to prove in the Temple that he still kept the law he told his converts was finished.4
Full evidence: The Jerusalem Council
Did Jesus set aside the law of Mūsā? #
ʿĪsā ibn Maryam said he came to fulfill the law, and that not a stroke of it would pass away.5 Paul called the law a curse and declared Christ its end.6
Full evidence: Seven doctrines: the law and the covenant
Does the New Testament speak with one voice? #
Paul’s letters contradict one another on the law, and more sharply still on the place of women. Scholars accept only seven of the thirteen letters that carry his name as his own work.
Full evidence: How Paul came to own the New Testament
Did Jesus claim to be God? #
In the Gospels he refuses even to be called good, since none is good but God, and he calls the Father the only true God.7 In the Qurʾān he describes himself as the servant of God.8 The divine Christ of Christian belief begins with Paul.
Full evidence: Two portraits of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam
Did Jesus found Christianity? #
His followers in Jerusalem kept the law and prayed in the Temple. The name “Christian” first appears at Antioch, the base of Paul’s missions to the Gentiles, and the religion that grew from there carries Paul’s theology.9
Full evidence: The church that followed Paul
Did Paul abolish the law, or only deny that it saves? #
Paul asks whether faith makes the law void, and answers “God forbid.”10 Later in the same letter he uses the same Greek verb, katargeō (καταργέω), to say that believers are “delivered from the law.”11 The covenant engraved in stones is a “ministration of death” that is “done away,”12 and Gentile converts who kept the law’s “days, and months, and times, and years” were turning back, he wrote, to “the weak and beggarly elements.”13 He kept the law where it served him: to those under the law he became as under the law, “that I might gain them.”14 The new covenant promised in Jeremiah writes the law on the heart, and so keeps it in force.15 The letter to the Hebrews reads the same passage and calls the first covenant “ready to vanish away,” a conclusion the verse it quotes will not bear.16
Full evidence: Twisting the scriptures
Do the three accounts of the Damascus road agree? #
In the first, the men with Saul “stood speechless”; in the third, Paul says “we were all fallen to the earth.”17 In the first, the men hear the voice; in the second, they “heard not the voice of him that spake.”18 The usual reply makes the Greek φωνή (phōnē) a voice in one verse and a mere sound in the other, although Luke uses the same word, in the same account, for the voice that spoke to Saul.
Full evidence: The Damascus road: one vision, three stories
Did Peter endorse Paul’s letters? #
The endorsement comes from 2 Peter, which calls Paul “our beloved brother” and concedes that his letters contain “some things hard to be understood.”19 The Catholic bishops’ own introduction to the letter records wide agreement among modern scholars that it was written in Peter’s name by a later hand, and notes that many date it to the first or even the second quarter of the second century. It counts the very passage on Paul among the reasons: the passage presupposes a known collection of Paul’s letters, already in dispute. The earliest certain mention of 2 Peter comes from Origen in the early third century, and some local churches still excluded it from the canon in the fifth.20 In Paul’s own letter, Peter is the man Paul withstood to his face at Antioch.21
Full evidence: The Jerusalem Council
Were the other gospels left out because they were anonymous, late or Gnostic? #
None of the four canonical gospels names its author in its text, and the letter to the Hebrews names no author at all. 2 Peter, doubted by the church for centuries, is placed by many scholars last of all the New Testament writings.22 Nor was every rejected voice Gnostic: Irenaeus records that the Ebionites kept the law and repudiated Paul as “an apostate from the law,” and he counted them heretics.23 The tests were applied selectively, and the canon they produced counts fourteen of its twenty-seven books as Paul’s.
Full evidence: How Paul came to own the New Testament
Doesn’t the Bible say that all scripture is inspired by God? #
The verse is 2 Timothy 3:16: “All scripture is given by inspiration of God.”24 The verse before it names the scripture it means: the holy scriptures that Timothy had known “from a child.”25 Those were the Jewish scriptures, since no Gospel existed in Timothy’s childhood and no New Testament had yet been gathered. 2 Timothy is also one of the three Pastoral letters that most scholars assign to Paul’s school after his death.26 The proof text for the inspiration of the whole Bible comes from a letter Paul probably did not write, and it speaks of the Hebrew Bible.
Full evidence: How Paul came to own the New Testament
Doesn’t the Book of Acts confirm Paul’s story? #
Acts is the only narrative of Paul’s life, and it is the source his own letters most often contradict. By his own account Paul was still “unknown by face unto the churches of Judaea” three years after his call; Acts has him raiding their houses.27 His letters make him the apostle to the Gentiles, while Acts sends him first to the synagogue in city after city.28 His hearers in Corinth thought his speech contemptible, and he conceded the point; Acts makes him an orator admired by governors.29 Acts never mentions that he wrote a letter, and it calls him an apostle only twice, jointly with Barnabas.30 Dale B. Martin of Yale, whose notes on the question are published on this site, concluded that the two portraits cannot be harmonised.31
Full evidence: Why Luke does not seem to know Paul’s letters
Does the Qurʾān confirm the New Testament? #
The Qurʾān confirms the Injīl (the Gospel), and it defines the Injīl as the book God gave to ʿĪsā ibn Maryam.32 The church long counted fourteen of the New Testament’s twenty-seven books as Paul’s letters, and its gospels are accounts written about ʿĪsā by others after those letters. The Qurʾān bids the People of the Gospel judge “by what Allah has revealed therein”,33 and it comes as “a criterion over” the scripture before it.34 The “Islamic dilemma” assumes that the Injīl and the New Testament are one book, which is the very point in question.
Full evidence: The Injīl and the letters
Did the Qurʾān promise that the followers of Jesus would prevail? #
It did, and the classical exegetes say who they are. Al-Ṭabarī reads “those who follow you” in Āl ʿImrān 3:55 as those who follow ʿĪsā in the religion of Islam.35 On al-Ṣaff 61:14 he records from Ibn ʿAbbās that the faction which held ʿĪsā to be the servant of God and His messenger was overpowered by the factions that called him God or the son of God. Its witness waited for the Prophet ﷺ to confirm it, and that confirmation was its victory.36 The church that prevailed in numbers descends from the factions the verse calls disbelieving.
Full evidence: The Injīl and the letters
- Acts 9:3–7, 22:6–9, 26:12–18. ↩
- 1 Corinthians 15:6. ↩
- Galatians 2:11. ↩
- Acts 21:17–26. ↩
- Matthew 5:17–18. ↩
- Galatians 3:13; Romans 10:4. ↩
- Mark 10:18; John 17:3. ↩
- Qurʾān, Maryam 19:30. ↩
- Acts 11:26. ↩
- Romans 3:31. ↩
- Romans 7:6. ↩
- 2 Corinthians 3:7, 11. ↩
- Galatians 4:9–10. ↩
- 1 Corinthians 9:20. ↩
- Jeremiah 31:33. ↩
- Hebrews 8:13. ↩
- Acts 9:7; 26:14. ↩
- Acts 9:4, 7; 22:9. ↩
- 2 Peter 3:15–16. ↩
- United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, introduction to the Second Letter of Peter, New American Bible, Revised Edition, https://bible.usccb.org/bible/2Peter/0. ↩
- Galatians 2:11–14. ↩
- United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, introduction to the Second Letter of Peter, New American Bible, Revised Edition, https://bible.usccb.org/bible/2Peter/0. ↩
- Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.26.2. ↩
- 2 Timothy 3:16. ↩
- 2 Timothy 3:15. ↩
- Dale B. Martin, “The ‘Household’ Paul: The Pastorals,” Lecture 19, RLST 152: Introduction to New Testament History and Literature, Open Yale Courses, Yale University, Spring 2009, https://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-152. ↩
- Galatians 1:22; Acts 8:3. ↩
- Galatians 2:7–9; Acts 17:1–4. ↩
- 2 Corinthians 10:10; 11:6; Acts 24:10; 26:1–3. ↩
- Acts 14:4, 14. ↩
- Dale B. Martin, “‘Luke’ versus Paul,” unpublished notes toward a book, written 18 March 2019 and revised 31 May and 5 June 2019, sent to the author in early 2023; published on this site with his permission: “Luke” versus Paul: the notes of Dale B. Martin. ↩
- Qurʾān, al-Māʾidah 5:46. ↩
- Qurʾān, al-Māʾidah 5:47. ↩
- Qurʾān, al-Māʾidah 5:48. ↩
- al-Ṭabarī, Jāmiʿ al-Bayān, ed. Maḥmūd Muḥammad Shākir, vol. 6, on Āl ʿImrān 3:55, before report no. 7149. ↩
- al-Ṭabarī, Jāmiʿ al-Bayān, on al-Ṣaff 61:14, from Saʿīd ibn Jubayr, from Ibn ʿAbbās. ↩