Scholarly consensus
In 2 Corinthians 11:13 Paul of Tarsus writes of “false apostles, deceitful workers, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder! Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.” In 11:5 and 12:11 he calls the same men, with heavy irony, “super-apostles”. They had come to Corinth with letters of recommendation (3:1), they were Hebrews, Israelites and descendants of Abraham (11:22), they preached “another Jesus” and “a different gospel” (11:4), and they had persuaded a church he had founded to doubt him. He never names them. The page before this one, and the two before that, have asked who stood on the other side of the first Christian quarrel. This page asks the same question of the men Paul of Tarsus himself accused.
Who were they?
Scholars disagree, and the letter gives only one side. The rivals were Jewish Christians, by Paul of Tarsus’s own description. They carried letters of recommendation, which means they were sent by someone. They boasted of visions and revelations, which is why Paul of Tarsus is driven to speak of his own (12:1-7). Some scholars (F. C. Baur, and in a different form Ernst Käsemann and C. K. Barrett) identify them with emissaries from the Jerusalem church, the same party as the “men from James” of Galatians 2:12 and the “false brothers” of Galatians 2:4, carrying the authority of the pillars against a man whose apostleship they did not recognise. Others (Dieter Georgi) see Hellenistic Jewish missionaries of a different kind, wonder-workers trading on eloquence. The first view explains the letters of recommendation and the appeal to Hebrew descent; the second explains the rhetoric. Either way, the quarrel at Corinth was between Paul of Tarsus and other Jewish followers of Jesus who claimed, as he did, to be apostles.
An accusation with two edges
Paul of Tarsus’s charge is that his rivals preach a gospel other than his own. But his own gospel, by his account, came to him by a revelation that no one else witnessed (Galatians 1:11-12), and his apostleship rested on having “seen Jesus our Lord” in that revelation (1 Corinthians 9:1; 15:8). He admits that his claim to be an apostle was disputed: “If I am not an apostle to others, at least I am to you” (1 Corinthians 9:2). In Galatians he curses anyone, even an angel from heaven, who preaches a gospel contrary to his (1:8-9). The men on the other side, who had letters from a church and perhaps from the Lord’s brother, would have said the same of him, and their letters would have said why: that he had not known Jesus, that he taught Jews to abandon the law, and that his authority rested on a vision he alone had seen. Their letters are lost. His survived, and were made scripture.
The twelve and the one
The gospels record that Jesus chose twelve (Mark 3:14) and sent them out (Mark 6:7). After the death of Judas the eleven filled the place from among men “who have accompanied us throughout the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us”, so that the new man would be “a witness with us to his resurrection” (Acts 1:21-22). That was the first community’s own definition of an apostle: a man who had been with Jesus from the beginning. Paul of Tarsus met none of the conditions and claimed the title anyway, as “one untimely born” (1 Corinthians 15:8). The Pseudo-Clementine Homilies, preserving a Jewish-Christian view, have Peter put the objection in words: can a man who has had a vision for an hour be a better teacher than those who heard the Lord for a year? (Homilies 17.19). The question was asked in the first century and has never been answered except by the authority of the man it was asked about.
What the gospels say about false prophets
Matthew 7:15-23 has Jesus warn of false prophets who come in sheep’s clothing, who prophesy and cast out demons in his name, and to whom he will say, “I never knew you; go away from me, you workers of lawlessness (anomia).” Matthew 24:11, 24 warns that many false prophets will arise and lead many astray with signs and wonders. The test the gospel gives is fruit, and the fruit it names is doing the will of the Father (7:21), which in Matthew means keeping the commandments (5:19; 19:17). The word anomia, lawlessness, is the word the Ebionites would have used of Paul of Tarsus, and it is the word Matthew’s Jesus uses of the prophets he will reject. This website does not claim that Matthew wrote the passage about Paul of Tarsus. It claims that the first community had a test for apostles, that the test was fidelity to the law of Moses, and that by that test Paul of Tarsus failed, as James’s church told him to his face (Acts 21:21).
Islamic position
The Islamic reading takes the dispute at Corinth, with the dispute at Antioch and the demand made in Jerusalem, as evidence that the first community was divided over Paul of Tarsus, that the division was about the law and about the source of his authority, and that the side which lost did not leave a record because its books were not preserved. The Qur’an says that the followers of ʿĪsā fell into sects and that God would judge between them (5:14; 19:37; 43:65), and that some who were given the book wrote with their own hands and said it was from God (2:79). It does not name Paul of Tarsus. It does not need to. It describes a man who said only what he was commanded, worship God, my Lord and your Lord (5:117), and the men who knew him kept the law and called him a prophet. The one who did not know him taught otherwise, on the strength of a vision, and called those who disagreed false apostles. The reader has the evidence and may decide which of the two the word fits. The full case is set out at apostleofdoom.org.
Sources
- Margaret Thrall, The Second Epistle to the Corinthians, International Critical Commentary, volume 2, on chapters 10-13.
- C. K. Barrett, “Paul’s Opponents in II Corinthians”, New Testament Studies 17 (1971).
- Dieter Georgi, The Opponents of Paul in Second Corinthians.
- Pseudo-Clementine Homilies 17, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, volume 8.