Jesus And Paul

Both Jesus and Paul have had their claims in the Bible get so distorted that many people actually think the Biblical Jesus rejected theonomy and that Paul taught gender stereotypes and complementarianism, Calvinism, and that conscience directly reveals moral obligations.  In fact, most misunderstandings of the Bible reduce down to misunderstandings of Jesus or Paul.  Even with common misrepresentations of the Old Testament on the part of Christians, a misrepresentation of something said by Jesus or Paul is almost always the factor behind it.  Then, when cornered, people who use a distortion of Christ's theology or Paul's will try to prioritize one over the other.

As with many other things, this is something that might never need to specifically be thought about if it was not for encountering asinine claims to the contrary.  Two truths are equally true; neither can be more true than the other, even if one is more important, more foundational, or more directly related to how someone lives or should live.  Two ideas that are inconsistent can both be false, but they cannot both be correct.  The words of Paul and of Jesus are actually consistent in ways that are often overlooked because of various idiotic misrepresentations of the New Testament, yet, if both of them are accurate in their claims, neither has any sort of inherent alignment with truth the other lacks.

On Christian theology, Jesus does have a higher metaphysical status than Paul, to be clear.  Paul is not a divine figure (not that Jesus is Yahweh, as that is a Trinitarian myth contradicted by both reason and the Bible itself).  All the same, if Jesus and Paul are both correct in their statements and the ideas behind them, then it is not as if Jesus is more right than Paul.  In this sense, Jesus has no special authority except in that he might be able to reveal claims Paul could not on his own.  For example, if Jesus really was a divine figure, he could more directly know certain details about his return even if he did not profess to know the exact timing.

Still, one truth is not truer than another no matter how important it is or, when applicable, who advocates for it or explains it.  Jesus and Paul are either ultimately in agreement no matter how wrongly they have been interpreted or one or both of them must be wrong.  It is simply idiotic for conservative Christians to pretend like a divinely inspired book, one that is without error, would be less or more true because of who is speaking, just as it is idiotic of liberal Christians to pretend like one author is more correct than another simply because they do not like what one of them says about an issue like homosexuality (in the case of Paul).

Of course, if one author or figure the Bible passes off as truthful was actually wrong about something, every single doctrine tied to that would also have to be false.  However, even if Paul was in error, that would not require that Jesus was, as Paul builds off of Christological ideas Jesus had already introduced.  Jesus, in contrast, could be right with or without Paul's agreement.  It is just that the two are not truly in disagreement in many of the ways some people might occasionally assert.  Indeed, many of the claims that they contradict each other are usually rooted in a desire to elevate the hopelessly vague nature of standalone commands to love others over the more specific moral and metaphysical concepts Paul sometimes addresses.  This emphasis on the former is wholly asinine.