The 13th God

Two Ways to Read the New Testament

There are two ways to read the New Testament. The first is the canonical way — the order that emerged from a series of ecclesiastical decisions culminating in what the Council of Trent confirmed in the 1540s. That order opens with four Gospels, then the Acts of the Apostles, and then pivots immediately into Paul's thirteen epistles. Romans arrives before you have caught your breath from Acts. The Gospels and Paul are presented as a continuous theological project, one flowing naturally from the other.

The second way is historical. In this reading, Paul's letters were composed before any of the Gospels were written. They were addressed to specific communities — the church in Rome, the Galatian congregations, the households at Corinth — in response to specific crises. They were not composed as the theological sequel to the Sermon on the Mount. They were composed by a man who had never met Jesus in the flesh, who had in fact persecuted Jesus's followers, and who had a conversion experience on a road in Syria that he took as his commissioning to preach a gospel he describes as revealed to him directly, not taught by any human.

These two reading strategies produce startlingly different pictures of what Christianity is.

"Paul is the thirteenth apostle who became the first theologian — and in doing so, he created a religion that Jesus never preached."

Jefferson's Razor

In 1819, Thomas Jefferson undertook a project he had contemplated for years. He obtained six copies of the New Testament — two in Greek, two in Latin, one in French, one in English — and with scissors and a paste pot, he cut out the passages he believed represented the authentic words and actions of Jesus, and discarded the rest. The resulting document, known today as the Jefferson Bible, runs to about eighty pages.

Jefferson was explicit about his criteria. He kept what he found philosophically coherent and morally elevating. He discarded the miracles, the supernatural claims, and — most significantly for our purposes — almost every trace of Paul. Jefferson considered Paul's epistles not the continuation of Jesus's teaching but its corruption. In a letter to John Adams in 1813, he called Paul "the first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus."

"Had there never been a commentator, there never would have been an infidel."
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp, 1816

The Council Decides

The New Testament canon was not handed down complete. It was assembled over centuries through a process of debate, political pressure, and ecclesiastical negotiation. By the time Athanasius published his famous Easter letter in 367 CE — the first known list that matches our current 27-book canon — Christianity had already been the religion of the Roman Empire for more than fifty years. The decisions about what counted as authoritative scripture were inseparable from decisions about what kind of church would exercise authority over that scripture.

The placement of Paul's letters directly after Acts was not inevitable. The Muratorian Fragment, one of the earliest canonical lists (late 2nd century), places Paul's letters after the Gospels but in a different order than our current canon. Marcion of Sinope, the second-century heretic whose collection of Pauline letters may have prompted the broader Catholic Church to formalize its own canon, placed Paul at the center of his Bible — and excluded the Old Testament entirely. Marcion understood what was at stake in the arrangement: order is argument.

This is telling. The Reformation — the most consequential theological rupture in Western Christianity — was fought on Pauline ground. Jesus was not disputed. Paul was.