Paul and Peter: two missions in the early church

The New Testament is often read as the record of a single, unified church. Its own earliest documents, Paul’s own letters, tell a rougher story: a real and public dispute between Paul and Peter over what a Gentile had to do to belong to the church of a Jewish messiah.

The confrontation at Antioch

Paul’s own account, in his letter to the Galatians, is the earliest first-hand record of any dispute in the church’s history. At Antioch, where Paul had preached for years, Jewish and Gentile Christians had been eating together without regard to Jewish dietary law. When representatives from the Jerusalem church, associated with James, the brother of Jesus, arrived, Peter stopped eating with the Gentile believers. Paul says he “opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned,” accusing Peter of hypocrisy: eating as a Gentile when it suited him, then compelling Gentiles to live as Jews once the Jerusalem party appeared.¹ Even Barnabas, Paul’s own missionary partner, sided with Peter.² The split was not confined to Antioch: in Corinth, a church Paul had founded, some believers were still identifying themselves by faction years later, “I belong to Paul,” others, “I belong to Cephas,” Peter’s Aramaic name.³

The New Testament scholar Michael Goulder, in a study of the earliest decades of the church, reads the incident as a genuine defeat for Paul at the time: “the die had been cast by now, and the Peter party, the Petrines, had won the round.”⁴ Paul’s own Gentile mission would eventually prevail as a matter of practice, since Christians today keep neither kosher law nor circumcision, but that outcome was not obvious in the moment, and Paul’s letter to the Galatians was written partly to fight a battle he had already lost once.⁵

Two accounts, one earlier and franker

The Acts of the Apostles gives a second account of the underlying dispute, at what is usually called the Jerusalem council, and its tone is markedly more harmonious than Paul’s own letter. Goulder describes Acts’ version as inflated, turning what was probably a private meeting into something resembling a full council, though the letter Acts records afterward, asking Gentile converts to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood and from sexual immorality, likely reflects the terms actually agreed.⁶ Paul’s letters, written by a participant close to the events, and Acts, written a generation or more later by an author working to present a unified church, do not read as independent confirmations of each other so much as two different angles on the same underlying conflict, one considerably more willing than the other to let the conflict show.

A later letter makes peace

A different kind of evidence for the same underlying tension comes from the New Testament’s own account of itself. The Second Letter of Peter closes by describing the letters of “our beloved brother Paul” as containing “some things hard to understand,” which the “ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures.”⁷ The line does two things worth noticing. It places Paul’s letters, by implication, alongside “the other scriptures”, and it puts Peter’s own authority behind Paul’s, addressing exactly the kind of dispute over Paul’s meaning that Goulder traces back to Antioch.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ own introduction to the letter states plainly that “among modern scholars there is wide agreement that 2 Peter is a pseudonymous work,” written by someone other than the apostle “according to a literary convention popular at the time,” and that many scholars regard it as the latest-written document in the New Testament, from the early or middle second century.⁸ Among the reasons given: the letter refers to the apostles as a prior generation, already dead; it responds to a settled collection of Paul’s letters, well known enough that disputes had already arisen over how to read them; and its account of false teachers borrows extensively from the Letter of Jude, in a direction scholars agree runs from Jude to 2 Peter and not the reverse.⁹ Even the early church was divided on the letter’s authenticity: Origen, in the early third century, is the earliest writer to mention it at all, and reports that others rejected it outright, a doubt that persisted in some churches into the fifth century.¹⁰

What the pattern shows

Read together, the evidence describes a real progression rather than a single settled position. Paul’s own letters preserve an open, personal conflict with Peter over the terms of Gentile membership in the church. Acts, writing later, softens the same conflict into a council reaching friendly agreement. A letter written in Peter’s name, later still, goes a step further and places apostolic authority explicitly behind Paul, folding his letters into scripture and warning against misreading them. The dispute did not vanish because it was resolved on the day it happened; it receded because later generations of the church wrote it into a settled peace.

Notes

1. Galatians 2:11-14. ↩
2. Galatians 2:13. ↩
3. 1 Corinthians 1:12. ↩
4. Michael D. Goulder, St. Paul versus St. Peter: A Tale of Two Missions (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1995), p. 3. ↩
5. Ibid., pp. 2-3. ↩
6. Ibid., p. 26; Acts 15:1-29. ↩
7. 2 Peter 3:15-16. ↩
8. “The Second Letter of Peter,” Introduction, New American Bible, Revised Edition (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, USCCB.org). ↩
9. Ibid. ↩
10. Ibid. ↩