But it is likely something much more significant is going on here, something Paul would never want to let out. If Paul’s charge that Peter was “compelling the Gentiles to live like Jews” has any force at all, it must reflect Peter’s sympathy with the idea that it was a perfectly fine and good thing if Gentiles who had become followers of Jesus were subsequently drawn toward Judaism and decided to convert. The issue would not be compulsion but free choice. Since the main issue Paul is addressing in the letter of Galatians is that his Gentile converts should not, under any circumstances, convert to Judaism, but remain as they are, Paul’s denunciation of Peter and Barnabas likely reflects his consternation at their welcoming Gentiles who wanted to convert. Judaism did welcome sincere converts and there is every reason to think that Peter, James, and the others would have done the same. Requiring conversion and welcoming those who might choose it, however, are two entirely separate issues. Paul’s position with his Gentile converts was that they did not need to convert to Judaism or keep the Torah in order to have a right relationship with God. That is not the same as saying that those who might choose to convert, having joined the Christian community as Gentiles, should be forbidden to do so. And that is the position that Paul took with his own converts. He tells them that if they receive circumcision, they are “cut off from Christ” (Galatians 5:2–4).
That Barnabas sides with Peter is quite telling, since he had spent years loyally working with Paul as a missionary partner. According to Acts he was a Levite, a member of a group that required the strictest observance of Torah, and he had the trust of the Jerusalem apostles (Acts 4:36). Apparently at this confrontation Paul begins to reveal a side of his teachings about the Torah of which even Barnabas, who had worked by his side, was not aware; otherwise surely Barnabas would have supported Paul on this occasion. It is also noteworthy that Barnabas is the one, according to Acts, who first introduced Paul to the Jerusalem church and vouched for him at Antioch as well (Acts 9:27; 11:25–26). Barnabas was closely tied to James and the Jerusalem apostles. He had been sent by them to provide leadership to the newly formed group in Antioch some decades earlier (Acts 11:22). The relations between Antioch and Jerusalem were close, as evidenced by the delegation from James arriving shortly before Paul’s outburst (Galatians 2:12).
As noted, we have only Paul’s side of the story and one should not assume that Peter and Barnabas agreed with Paul or were somehow properly rebuked and put in their place by Paul’s harsh denunciation. They might well have defended themselves quite ably against his charges and it is very possible that given the circumstances it was Paul who was rebuked at Antioch. If Peter had apologized or acknowledged that Paul was correct, we surely would have Paul including that fact as part of his account. The fierceness of this confrontation was likely the first crack in the façade of harmony between Paul and the Jerusalem leadership.
It is quite significant that Acts records that right after the Jerusalem meeting of A.D. 50, when Paul and Barnabas had returned to Antioch, they had a “sharp contention” and permanently split, never to work together again (Acts 15:39). Acts says the reason was whether to take Mark with them as they planned their next missionary trip—Paul objected and Barnabas wanted him along. It seems more likely that the confrontation with Peter and Barnabas over eating with the Gentiles, which Paul reports and Acts ignores, may have been the real cause of their bitter split.
What this evidence appears to indicate is that up until around A.D. 50, during the first decade of Paul’s missionary work in the cities of Asia Minor, when he was working with Barnabas, he was not expressing, at least publicly, the full implications of his views about the Torah of Moses being invalidated by the new covenant he was preaching. It is possible that Paul only gradually came to this view. In his earliest letter to his congregation at Thessalonica, probably around A.D. 51, he says nothing controversial about the Jewish Torah and seems to be expounding a fairly simple standard of ethics appropriate to the God-fearer status of his followers. It is not until around A.D. 56, with his letters to the Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans, that we begin to get a glimpse of Paul’s full views about the implications of “his” gospel—as we have seen in previous chapters.
What apparently has changed in this time period is that delegates have visited Paul’s congregations from James, including Peter himself, and they have begun to raise questions about some of the things they are hearing. We pick up these tensions particularly in Galatians and running through the Corinthian correspondence. There is an explicit challenge to Paul’s apostleship; his emotional outburst against Peter and Barnabas at Antioch are our first hint at just how serious things could become.
One point that is extremely important but seldom noted is that although Paul calls himself an apostle, there is no indication that the Jerusalem leadership had ever given him that status. By authorizing his preaching to the Gentiles they were not thereby conferring on him any special apostolic authority. The book of Acts intends to imply that Paul and Barnabas were “apostles,” simply because they were “sent out” as missionaries, but it is more likely that this designation, at least as used by the Jerusalem church, was reserved for the Twelve. The book of Acts indicates the same when Judas Iscariot, who had betrayed Jesus and killed himself, is formally replaced by the casting of lots by the Eleven, with a disciple named Matthias chosen (Acts 1:21–26). One of the requirements of such an apostle was that he had been with the group from the beginning—starting with the preaching of John the Baptizer and all through Jesus’ lifetime. Paul clearly did not qualify. But as we have seen, in Paul’s mind he was overqualified in this regard, since he was hearing directly from the heavenly Christ, while Peter and the others were relying on what they had learned from the “earthly” Jesus during his lifetime.
Things came to a confrontation sometime around A.D. 55–56. Our first evidence of the tension is in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, but the full extent of Paul’s break with the Jerusalem leadership comes out in 2 Corinthians 10–13, a section of the letter that seems to have been written independently of the whole as the situation Paul was dealing with at Corinth deteriorated and he came to feel he had lost all power with his followers.
Scholars agree that Paul is facing a group of outside opponents who have come to Corinth in his absence and tried to take over his congregation. They have been characterized in at least a dozen different ways, though most commonly they are thought to be some kind of Palestinian Jewish-Christian “Gnostics” who were boasting about their visions and revelations and their superior credentials as “apostles” while questioning Paul’s legitimacy, power, and status.7
In the early nineteenth century, the German scholar Ferdinand Christian Baur, who is the “father” of critical studies of Paul, had proposed that Paul’s opponents in 2 Corinthians 10–13 were none other than James, Peter, and the Jerusalem Twelve. His view has generally been abandoned since, though some would agree that whatever group was at Corinth claimed its authorization from the Jerusalem apostles. I believe that Baur was essentially correct.8 What we find in these chapters is Paul’s complete repudiation of the Jerusalem apostles and his determination to operate independently in the future, without regard to their approval or directives.