The Gospel According to Paul: Over a Hundred Years of Interpretation

Abstract

Paul’s gospel has been the subject of numerous scholarly discussions since the start of the twentieth century. Beginning with Adolf Harnack and ending with Matthew Bates, this article provides insights into the gospel from biblical scholars who have contributed to and influenced this particular area of study for more than a hundred years. The results of this investigation show that some of the major areas of concern center on the origin of Paul’s gospel, its content, and his use of gospel terminology, especially the noun εὐαγγέλιον. A notable issue focuses on the noun form not being found in a sacred-salvific sense in Jewish Scripture but found instead in the imperial cult at the end of first century BCE. Another major point is whether Paul introduced εὐαγγέλιον to the Jesus-believing communities or whether the term originated from Hellenistic believers or Aramaic speakers prior to Paul. Another important subject is whether Scripture and Deutero-Isaiah influenced Paul and the early Christ-community’s use of the gospel. The study concludes, among other things, that Paul uses the gospel noun and verb almost interchangeably, although he may have emphasized the noun as a result of imperial use. Another conclusion is that he was not the first to use this term among Jesus-believing communities.

1. Introduction

A number of scholars have shaped the interpretative landscape of Paul’s gospel in previous studies since the beginning of the twentieth century. Interest in biblical studies related to the word “gospel” seems to have been prompted by two events at the end of the nineteenth century. First, Gustaf Dalman (Dalman 1898; Dalman 1902, pp. 102–4) argued from Hebrew and Aramaic that Jesus originally spoke of the “sovereignty of God” as the content of the “announcement” or “tidings” without qualifying this as a message of “glad tidings” that was more readily understood by the later Greek use of εὐαγγελίζω/εὐαγγελίζεσθαι. Differently than this later use, Jesus’s proclamation aimed foremost at leading people to repentance (cf. Matt 4:17). Dalman’s view opened up questions about the origin of the gospel and how, if not from Jesus, this word became prominent in early Christian discourse. Second, an apparent answer came by way of the Priene calendar inscription in western Turkey (c. 9 BCE) that was first published at the end of the nineteenth century (Mommsen and Wilamowitz-Moellendorf 1899).1 In this inscription, Caesar Augustus’s birthday is considered good news in a sacred context: “the birthday of the god was for the world the beginning of things which owing to him are glad tidings” (ἦρξεν δὲ τῶι κόσμωι τῶν δι’ αὐτὸν εὐανγελί[ων ἡ γενέθλιος ἡμε]ρα τοῦ θεοῦ).2 A workable answer for the origin of the early Christ-community’s use of the gospel/good news (εὐαγγέλιον), then, may have been attributed to Jesus and derived from its popular use for the emperor in the Roman world, as is evident from this inscription from c. 9 BCE.3

Reactions to this discovery seem to have sparked extensive studies on the gospel in the years and decades that followed. To this day, that endeavor remains, though no consensus appears to be forthcoming regarding the gospel’s origin, as I will demonstrate. We will focus our attention on Paul’s gospel and cover a number of his major interpreters from the early-, mid-, and late-twentieth century along with his present interpreters in the twenty-first century. Along the way and in conclusion, I plan to add my own reflections in response to the interpretations.

2. Paul’s Gospel Interpreters: Early- to Mid-Twentieth Century

2.1. Adolf Harnack

Adolf Harnack was an early respondent to the Priene inscription and wrote extensively on the biblical gospel (Harnack 1910a, pp. 275–331; Harnack 1910b). Harnack begins by defining the gospel (εὐαγγέλιον) as originally meaning “the reward (also the sacrifice) for good tidings, the messenger’s reward, but later also the good news itself.” The term’s first evidence is found in the Priene inscription in relation to Augustus’s birthday (Harnack 1910a, p. 275). After identifying the equivalent term in the Hebrew Scriptures (noun: בּשׂרה/verb: בִּשַּׂר), he surveys the noun εὐαγγέλιον in the Gospels, which is found in Mark and Matthew (minus Q). The verb εὐαγγελίζω is found in Luke and Q only. Paul’s letters, on the other hand, repeatedly include the noun 60 times and the verb 20 times. The former appears in every epistle except Titus. The terms for Harnack are characteristic of Paul’s preaching, though the verb is not entirely a technical term meaning “to preach the gospel.” In 1 Thess. 3:6, for example, it is used in a sense of Timothy’s “glad tidings” report to Paul about the Thessalonians (Harnack 1910a, p. 292). Paul nonetheless frequently uses the noun and verb in an absolute sense, expecting his readers to already understand what he means. It is also improbable that he was the first to use the word “gospel” and that was almost unknown in Palestine (Harnack 1910a, pp. 293–94).

After examining the gospel in the rest of the New Testament, Clement, Hermas, and Barnabas, he discusses the transition of the word “gospel” from Jesus’s deeds and sayings to it becoming the written form of these deeds and sayings in the four Gospels. Justin Martyr (c. 100–165) writes about precepts in the gospel that are read by Trypho (Dial. 10), and elsewhere Justin uses the phrase, “it is written in the Gospel” with reference to Matt. 11:27 (Dial. 100), suggesting a written gospel that was already present around 150 CE (Harnack 1910a, p. 311).4 Harnack also points to the Didache, which has a record of Jesus’s words and deeds as “gospel” (8.2; 15.3–4). Ignatius of Antioch seems to hold to a use of gospel similar to the way Paul did (Philad. 8.2; 9.2; 10.1–2), but there is also evidence that Ignatius and his recipients held to the gospel in a written form (Smyrn. 4; 15.4–5). Harnack thus thinks the letters of Ignatius (c. 110–117) were written during a transitory period in which the saint seems to know the Gospels, especially Matthew’s (Harnack 1910a, pp. 311–15).

Harnack’s primary conclusions about the gospel are as follows. First, Jesus proclaimed the coming kingdom of God and this was understood as a glad tidings message. It is uncertain, however, whether he used the latter simply in terms of his fulfilling the proclamation of the good news based on Isaiah 61:1 or whether the noun in Hebrew (בּשׂרה) summed up his proclamation. Second, the primitive Christ community in Palestine used בּשׂרה, and their Hellenistic brothers and sisters in Palestine adopted its use as εὐαγγέλιον. Mark’s Gospel reflects that early use (e.g., Mark 1:1). Matthew adds “of the kingdom” to the term retaining its original sense (e.g., Matt. 4:23). The concept did not originate from the Septuagint; it does not use the singular neuter εὐαγγέλιον. Third, Paul makes εὐαγγέλιον central to his preaching of God’s salvific plan proclaimed by the prophets and realized in Jesus’s death and resurrection. For Paul, Christ, or his passion and resurrection, is the content of the gospel. Paul also does not pit the gospel against the law: “when he speaks of the Gospel he is not thinking of the Law but of the fulfilment of the promise… On the other hand, he thinks of ‘gospel’ and ‘salvation’ (σωτερία) as inseparably united, and indeed salvation for men as individuals. The individual who has faith in the Gospel is justified” (Harnack 1910a, p. 326). Fourth, Luke mysteriously favors the verb εὐαγγελίζω while avoiding the noun εὐαγγέλιον, though he does use the noun in Acts for Peter’s and Paul’s speeches (Acts 15:7; 20:24). Luke consistently has Jesus preaching the kingdom, whereas the apostles preach about Jesus. Philip’s speech uniquely combines the two in Acts 8:12. Finally, εὐαγγέλιον as “equivalent to the essence of missionary preaching” is rejected in Luke’s Gospel, John’s Gospel, and Hebrews, though contained in 1 Peter. It takes on a different subsequent history than its verb. The noun turns out to have a fourfold sense of early Christian preaching, the tidings of Jesus crucified and resurrected, Jesus’s deeds and sayings (“gospel history”) or the life of Jesus as recorded in the four Gospels, and finally in later Christian history, the gospel “denotes the nature and influence of the new religion as the religion of grace and freedom in distinction from the Old Testament stage of law and bondage” (Harnack 1910a, p. 328).

Harnack brings up a number of important points related to the gospel, including its potential origin through Jesus’s words, as well as in the early Palestinian Christ community that used בּשׂר terms before the Hellenistic believers used εὐαγγέλιον, which was already in use by the Roman imperial cult. Paul is also not considered the gospel’s originator for the Christ community. Paul’s use involves the apostle equating the gospel of Christ with the gospel of God and his unifying of the gospel with the salvation of individuals by faith and related to justification. Such observations evince that the gospel is complex. The scholars that follow sometimes make their departure from various points raised by Harnack, while others adopt and expand on them.

2.2. Julius Schniewind and Gerhard Friedrich

Another influential work that came out the same year as Harnack’s work was a dissertation by Julius Schniewind on Paul’s use of the gospel (Schniewind 1910). Prompted by a perceived gap in the literature regarding the use of the concepts word and gospel in Paul, Schniewind pursues phrases such as the “word of God”, “word of the Lord”, and gospel terms throughout the entire Pauline corpus except the Pastoral letters (Schniewind 1910, pp. 7–9). His study concludes that, while there are some differences, Paul’s use of word and gospel in relevant passages are interchangeable. For example, in 2 Cor. 4:1–4 there is a sequence of the “word of God” (4:2), “our gospel” (4:3), and the “gospel… of Christ” (4:4). See also 1 Thess. 1:5–8; 2:2, 4, 8–9, 13; 2 Thess. 3:1 + 2:14; 1 Cor. 1:17–18; Rom. 10:8–10, 14–17; and Eph. 6:15, 17 (Schniewind 1910, esp. pp. 114–17). Schniewind’s later word study, Euangelion, covers the gospel concept thoroughly in the Old Testament, LXX, Philo, Josephus, and Greco-Roman literature, but it remained incomplete, never completing gospel connections with Synoptic material and the imperial cult (Schniewind 1970).5 Wanting to understand the gospel term’s significance in pre-Jesus use, Schniewind interprets the verb εὐαγγελίζω in Deutero-Isaiah as having a religious sense tied with the messenger of joy, who is connected with the word of Yahweh.6

Gerhard Friedrich, in his influential word study originally published in Theologische Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament, adopts many of Schniewind’s findings and frequently cites them (Friedrich 1964, vol. 2, pp. 707–37).7 Although Friedrich’s study is more accessible and broader in scope, it is dwarfed by the completed portions of Schniewind’s work that examine the OT/Septuagint, Philo, Josephus, and Greco-Roman material. The word studies of both Schniewind and Friedrich are helpful in regard to collecting data from both biblical and ancient Mediterranean discourses on the gospel terms. They both address the “secular” and “religious” uses of the gospel and suggest Deutero-Isaiah to be of significance in later traditions such as in ancient Palestinian Judaism. The gospel terms in Philo and Josephus, on the other hand, do not appear to be influenced by Isaianic tradition (Friedrich 1964, vol. 2, p. 714).

Significant is their observation that whereas Isaiah uses the verb εὐαγγελίζω in common with the NT, it does not use the singular noun εὐαγγέλιον (Isa 40:9; 52:7; 60:6; 61:1).8 All the same, Isaianic and Psalm texts are relevant for the NT when it comes to proclamation of the kingdom of God (βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ), “eschatological expectation”, introducing the nations/gentiles into salvific history, “the rejection of the ordinary religion of cult and Law” (Ps. 40), and “links with the terms δικαιοσύνη (Ps. 40:9), σωτηρία (Is. 52:7; Ps. 95:1), and εἰρήνη (Is. 52:7)” (Friedrich 1964, vol. 2, pp. 709–10). Regarding the gospel and imperial cult, Friedrich (1964, vol. 2, p. 725) writes: “Caesar and Christ, the emperor on the throne and the despised rabbi on the cross, confront one another. Both are evangel to men. They have much in common. But they belong to different worlds”.

That one could normally distinguish between the “secular” and “religious” uses of the term is questionable, especially when the glad tidings of Israel’s political or military victories would seem to be attributed to God even if not expressly stated. Likewise, in Greco-Roman material, the good news of such things would assume that national deities or fortune—herself a deity (Tyche)—were involved. Another questionable aspect is whether such a clear dichotomy should be made between the spheres of Christ and Caesar in early Christian texts when the Roman influence was so pervasive, especially among the gentiles that Paul reached.

2.3. C. H. Dodd

A well-known study on apostolic preaching that engaged with the gospel and kerygma comes from Cambridge professor C. H. Dodd (Dodd 1936, esp. pp. 7–35). Dodd distinguishes between teaching (διδάσκω) and preaching (κήρυγμα, κηρύσσω) in early Christian usage, asserting that the former, in “a large majority of cases”, pertains to ethical instruction, whereas preaching “is the public proclamations of Christianity to the non-Christ world” (Dodd 1936, p. 7). The verb κηρύσσω has as its object the gospel, and this verb is virtually equivalent to εὐαγγελιζέσθαι, which for Dodd means “to evangelize” or “preach the Gospel”. Dodd maintains that it is kerygma, not didache, that saves. With this staring point he ventures into uncovering the content of the gospel that the apostles proclaimed. He observes and uses recurrent relevant phrases in Scripture, the proclamation of the kingdom of God in the Synoptic tradition, and Paul’s “preaching Christ” in the Book of Acts. Dodd suggests that a companion of Paul’s valued his preaching just as that companion valued the kingdom of God proclamations of Jesus and his disciples (i.e., Luke-Acts). Differently, Paul’s own letters are not really about kerygma as such but address Christian readers who are dealing with ethical and theological problems. His letters thus characterize “teaching” or “exhortation” that already presupposes proclamation and defends its implications.

One could nonetheless infer that what Paul preached is what he calls “my gospel” (Rom. 2:16), which was not necessarily what other preachers proclaimed. The content of that gospel can also be recovered. This is evident through his proclamation of “Christ and Him crucified” (1 Cor. 1:23), Christ as the foundation of Paul’s gospel (1 Cor. 3:10), and comparative statements relevant to his gospel found in passages such as 1 Cor. 15:1–5; Gal. 1:4; Rom. 10:8–9; 14:9–10; 1 Thess. 1:9–10; and 2 Cor. 5:10. The language about Christ in Rom. 1:3–4, however, is unlike Paul elsewhere. Here, he claims Jesus as a Davidic descendent that confirms his messianic status. Such wording seems to be related to a gospel he shares in common with other preachers. One can adduce from these observations an emergent outline of commonly-held early Christian kerygma, a tradition that Paul learned after his conversion (c. 33–34 CE). He may have learned such a kerygma, for example, a few years after his Damascus experience when spending more than a fortnight with Peter (Gal. 1:15–18)—they obviously “did not spend all the time talking about the weather” (Dodd 1936, p. 16).

The early kerygma that Dodd uncovers is as follows: (1) there is the prophetic fulfillment and inauguration of a new era through Christ’s coming; (2) Christ was born as the offspring of David; (3) Christ died in accordance with Scriptures and delivered humans from the “present evil age”; (4) Christ was buried; (5) Christ rose again on the third day in accordance with Scripture; (6) Christ is exalted at God’s right hand as Son and Lord of the living and dead; and (7) Christ will come again as savior and judge.

Paul’s adaptation of apostolic proclamation, though, must have contained more than this. Dodd appeals to the preaching of later Pauline letters and in Acts. He suggests that there is good evidential reason to assume that speeches attributed to Peter came from the Aramaic-speaking Jerusalem church (Acts 2:14–36, 38–39; 3:12–26; 4:8–12; 5:29–32; 10:34–43). The kerygmatic points made earlier are here confirmed and expanded on with the significant addition that the kerygma “always closes with an appeal for repentance, the offer of forgiveness and of the Holy Spirit, and the promise of ‘salvation’, that is, of ‘the life of the Age to Come’, to those who enter the election community, as in Acts 2:38–39 in which they are to repent and be baptized ‘upon the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of your sins, and you will received the gift of the Holy Spirit’” (cf. Acts 5:31; 10:43/Joel 2:32; Isa. 57:19). (Dodd 1936, pp. 23–24). Dodd suggests that this is what Acts means by “preaching the Kingdom of God”. This characterizes Jesus’s own preaching in Mark 1:14–15 with the time being fulfilled, God’s kingdom drawing near, and the need for hearers of the message to repent and believe the gospel. The prophetic time fulfilled and kingdom’s nearness is expanded on by apostolic preaching to include Jesus’s ministry, death, resurrection, and exaltation. Repentance and believing reappear in light of apostolic kerygma. Whether Jesus’s preaching came first in Mark or the primitive church’s preaching was first, modeled on Jesus, the two for Dodd are identical: “the Kingdom of God is conceived as coming in the events of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and to proclaim these facts, in their proper setting, is to preach the Gospel of the Kingdom of God” (Dodd 1936, p. 24).

Finally, for Dodd, Paul also emphasizes other kerygmatic statements such as Jesus as the Son of God, his dying for our sins, and his intercession for his followers. The kerygma also emphasizes the Holy Spirit, which is prominent in Pauline texts, as is calling, election, and “Israel of God”. What is missing in his preaching, so far as his letters are concerned, is Jesus’s life and ministry and teachings. Peter’s speeches only slightly mention such things, and Paul’s speech in Acts 13 also covers slightly Jesus’s life and John the Baptist. Dodd suggests that the speech in Acts may reflect Paul’s preaching, perhaps when in synagogues (Dodd 1936, p. 30, cf. pp. 27–29).

Dodd’s study highlights several perceptive points regarding Paul’s gospel. The first is that parts of his kerygma did not originate from him but were shared with other early gospel proclaimers. Many scholars today, for example, concur with Dodd that Paul’s statements about Christ in Rom. 1:3–4 do not originate with him, or at least not entirely so. They originate from a tradition passed on to him from other early Jesus Messianic followers. Through Dodd’s list of kerygmatic statements, we can hear echoes from texts such as 1 Cor.15:3–4 and Gal. 1:4. Yet in the very text of 1 Cor. 15, the apostle claims to have received his creed-like statement from others before him.9 A second perceptive point from Dodd is that we can infer that Paul did not receive his gospel all at once during his Damascus road experience (DRE). It developed over a process of years, not the least of which was his first meeting with Peter and James about three years after his DRE.

A final point from Dodd worth mentioning is that statements related to Paul’s gospel should not be limited to his letters or even what was written before his letters. Post-Pauline writings, such as the speeches in Acts, also may have something to contribute when it comes to beliefs and statements that may pre-date or be contemporaneous with Paul’s own. In support of post-Paulist evidence, Benjamin White has recently argued that sources such as the disputed Pauline letters, Acts, and other early Christian documents from the second century all have valuable things to say in remembrance of the first generation of Christ-followers like Paul (White 2014, 2022). When it comes to our academic attempts to get back at what the historical Paul did and said, or might have said, the cautious use of a maximum rather than minimum list of ancient materials seems to be a prudent approach moving forward.

A prominent point of criticism regarding Dodd’s study is that he makes too much of a distinction between Pauline preaching and teaching. The two often overlap in the apostle’s writings, and indeed, they must overlap if the salvation that the gospel brings only begins at conversion but must be maintained in perseverance throughout the rest of one’s life. Dodd himself affirms that a staple kerygmatic point involves Christ returning again as judge. For Paul, even those who confess faith will be among those who are to be judged according to their deeds in front of the judgment seat of Christ (2 Cor. 5:10; cf. Rom. 2:6–16). It would seem necessary, then, for Paul to urge and teach his congregations how to live in a manner worthy of the gospel they already received (Phil. 1:27).

2.4. Rudolf Bultmann

Rudolph Bultmann likewise addressed early Christian kerygma that for him developed in seven stages to eventually become Gospel as a literary form, beginning with the Gospel of Mark (Bultmann 1951, vol. 1, p. 86; Bultmann 1948). Its stages included, first, the “germ-cell” kerygma of Jesus’s death and resurrection. Second, a short kerygma of the Passion needed fuller envisioning, such as in 1 Cor. 11:23–26 and 15:3–7, and its “assignment of place in the divine plan of salvation” filling this need as proofs of fulfilled prophecy and John the Baptist’s account. Third, an account of Christian sacraments needed to be included in the life of Jesus. After that, miracle stories were added to justify Jesus’s authority and divinity. Then, fifth, short stories with a saying of Jesus (apophthegms) came next. Sixth, preaching to Christians took on more importance, and thus Jesus’s role expanded as a teacher. Then, finally, moral exhortations and congregational regulations were added to Jesus’s words and life.

For Bultmann, the substantive gospel or “evangel” (εὐαγγέλιον) meant simply “news”, “message”, or was used for the act of proclaiming, and its verb εὐαγγελίζω meant “to proclaim”. The sense of “good” attached to both of these had “worn off” for the most part already in the Septuagint and Philo, and that is why ἀγαθά has to be added as the verb’s object in the LXX (cf. 3 Kngdm. 1:42; Isa. 52:7). Also, sometimes the verb has nothing to do with good news in texts found in Luke–Acts (Luke 3:18; Acts 14:15) and Revelation (Rev. 10:7; 14:6). The absolute use of gospel/evangel as a technical term is sometimes seen in Paul’s letters, and from there, it circulated more broadly. Bultmann rejects that the term’s absolute use originates with the sacral use found in the imperial cult, and it does not seem to originate with the “earliest Church”, since the substantive use is missing in Q and in Mark it only appears in “secondary formations” (Bultmann 1951, vol. 1, pp. 87–88). It is not entirely clear that it originated with Paul either, but Bultmann is willing to suggest that the absolute use “developed in Hellenistic Christianity gradually, but relatively quickly” (Bultmann 1951, vol. 1, p. 87).

Bultmann’s view on how the kerygma developed into the Gospel as a genre leaves open the criticism that the Jesus of history in this model seems to have very little to do with this development. More important in relation to Paul is whether his gospel points us in the direction of a Hellenistic origin. Contrary to some of the scholars we have yet to discuss regarding the gospel’s origin, Bultmann rejects imperial influence on the one end and the pre-Hellenistic Christian influence on the other. Nevertheless, other scholars have taken a path similar to Bultmann’s. For example, Gerhard Krodel, referencing Bultmann, accepted a Hellenistic origin for the term against both the imperial cult and “the earliest Palestinian community” (Krodel 1967, p. 97, cf. pp. 98–99). A final issue is whether “good” needed to be the object of εὐαγγελίζω to mean “proclaim the good news” prior to Paul. Bultmann does not address, for example, whether this object in Isa. 52:7 (also cited by Paul in Rom. 10:15) might be for emphasis rather than clarification.

2.5. A. M. Hunter

Originally entitled as Interpreting Paul’s Gospel (Hunter 1954), Archibald Macbride Hunter later revised his work and retitled it The Gospel According to St. Paul (Hunter 1966).10 In the latter, Hunter works with ten Pauline epistles, minus the Pastorals, and considers Paul’s Damascus road experience as significant for his prolegomena. The implications of that encounter took time to become clear to Paul but eventually resulted in “three decisive consequences”: (1) that he encountered Jesus of Nazareth who was alive as Messiah; (2) that Jesus was crucified but now risen, and thus Jesus died “for us”; and (3) that salvation is by divine grace, the term becoming “almost a single-word expression for the Gospel he preached” (Hunter 1966, p. 12, cf. p. 13). Even so, Hunter interprets the gospel foremost by the word “salvation” (σωτηρία). The term is reflected well in the “power of God for salvation” (Rom. 1:16), the “gospel of your salvation” (Eph. 1:13), and the “word of salvation” in the apostle’s first missionary sermon as passed on in Acts 13:26. Salvation in this regard signifies bodily and spiritual soundness, well-being “in all its forms”, and deliverance from sin and death, and not only being saved from but being saved to “reconciliation and righteousness and life” (Hunter 1966, p. 15). This salvation is expressed in terms of a past event (Rom. 8:24), present experience (1 Cor. 15:2), and future hope (Rom. 5:9).

First, as a past event, the gospel’s salvation looks to the crucifixion, the finished work of Christ on the cross. In keeping with traditional Protestant interpretation, Hunter identifies the human predicament as being enslaved by sin, which made use of the “flesh” and attempts to secure salvation by Mosaic and natural law; Hunter identifies human effort as legalism. If the human predicament is described by the notions sin, the flesh, and the law, then the remedy takes place through redemption, justification, and reconciliation. Redemption involves deliverance from sin’s servitude, and justification has to do with acquittal and declaring a person righteous, though forgiveness is emphasized and God’s righteousness is considered a divine activity related to God’s saving and vindicating action. Regarding reconciliation, sin has alienated the human from a familial relationship in which they are to be restored to “God’s family circle” (Hunter 1966, pp. 19–23). This change targets not the person’s legal status but his or her entire life, but this believer must become what he or she already is in principle, a new creation in Christ. Faith involves utter trust and is opposed to works as a condition of salvation (meritorious human effort), but not good works as a consequence of salvation (such as faith working through love: Gal. 5:6).

Second, again in keeping with a traditional perspective, Hunter writes that gospel salvation in the present segues from justification to sanctification, or Gabe und Aufgabe (cf. Col. 1:13; Rom. 1:17; 5:2). To be “in Christ” is to belong to the body of Christ, the church, which connects the person to fellow believers. This includes the living presence of Christ through the Holy Spirit, and believers are to live ethically in a manner “worthy of the gospel of Christ” (Phil. 1:27; cf. Eph. 4:1; Col. 3:1). This includes acting as Christ did (imitation), acting as Christ directed by moral teachings (Gal 6:2; 1 Cor. 9:21), and acting in love as members of his body (Hunter 1966, pp. 32–47).

Third and lastly, salvation includes a future hope. Here, Hunter adopts the World War II illustration of Oscar Cullmann (1950) to affirm that believers are currently living, as it were, between D-Day and V-Day of God’s salvific action in Christ. Salvific theology is already realized in the sense of decisive action taking place on the cross (“D-Day”), but “V-Day” is yet to come, which is the Parousia or “royal coming” of the Lord Jesus Christ (Hunter 1966, p. 52).

Hunter interprets Paul’s gospel in a more-or-less standard fashion for twentieth century Anglo-Protestantism. This gospel centers on salvation, which is quite understandable given the many Pauline passages relevant to soteriology. Paul, however, seems to be more interested in the salvation of Jews and gentiles as people groups than Hunter brings out; his focus is instead on the salvation of individuals. Hunter’s soteriology centers more on the effect or appropriation of the gospel than its standard content, such as Jesus identified as Messiah, Lord, and Son of God, who died on the cross and rose again (1 Cor. 15:1–4; Rom. 1:1–4). Had Hunter’s study unpacked the origin and use of the term “gospel” in relation to Paul, perhaps a more fully-orbed perspective of his gospel might have emerged.

A noticeable distinction between Hunter’s position and more recent interpretations of Paul centers on his critique of Mosaic Law. Such was common for the time, especially among Protestant circles (e.g., Longenecker 1964, pp. 120, 124, 153, 176, 179–83, 196, 208).11 Hunter’s view did not seem to anticipate well a “new perspective” that was brewing through Stendahl’s (1963) work and that, in the decade to follow, would start overturning the tides of Protestant scholarship, beginning with E. P. Sanders’s studies. At the same time, what has stood the test of time regarding the traditional perspective is that, for Paul, Mosaic law does not save—trust in Jesus as Messiah and Lord is what saves. Hunter also rightly brings out the importance of Paul’s Damascus road experience as a sort of fountainhead for his gospel and theology. Hunter’s inclusion of being “in Christ”, the importance of the Holy Spirit’s work, and the goal of restoring the divine “family”, all seem to be ahead of their time.

3. Paul’s Gospel Interpreters: Mid- to Late Twentieth Century

3.1. Peter Stuhlmacher

Peter Stuhlmacher has performed extensive work on Paul’s gospel that spans across several decades (Stuhlmacher 1968, 1982, 1991a, 1991c, 1991d; 2018, pp. 346–84). His first endeavor attempts to arrive at a plausible origin for Paul’s gospel by examining biblical (OT) and Hellenistic Jewish sources, Greek material, and then potential pre-Pauline church influences. Prominent for Stuhlmacher is the influence of Revelation 10:7 and 14:6 for early Jewish believers and certain Gospel texts such as Q that has Jesus alluding to the prophecy of the anointed one who gives good news to the poor in Isaiah 61:1 (Matt. 11:2–6; Luke 7:18–23). The gospel originates in the primitive Jewish–Christian Palestinian church that maintains an apocalyptic understanding of God’s coming judgment (for the unrepentant) and salvation (for the repentant), which is then coupled with the message about Jesus Christ. Paul adopts the apocalyptic character of this message in relation to Christ’s resurrection and reign, emphasizing christological lordship (rather than the “Son of Man”), stressing the new era as inclusive of gentiles, and salvation through Christ and not the Torah (Stuhlmacher 1968, pp. 107–8, 207–44, 286–89).

His more refined study targeting Paul discusses his gospel in terms of its origin, content, relation to tradition, character, aftereffects, and outlook. The origin of Paul’s gospel is from divine election and the gift of salvation given to him when the son of God revealed himself to him on the way to Damascus. This experience endowed the apostle with authority—he was entrusted to proclaim the gospel, a message that does not originate from humans but God (Gal. 1:1, 11–12, 15–16; cf. 1 Cor. 9:16–18; Gal. 2:2, 7; 1 Thess. 2:4). The gospel is “a power of revelation” (Rom. 1:16) that “provides the apostle with the liturgy of his mission, and it is his office, through the performance of this liturgy, to present to God the well-pleasing and holy sacrifice of the Gentiles converted to faith by the gospel (Rom. 15:16; cf. 11:13ff)”, as though he were a Levite for Christ the High Priest (Stuhlmacher 1991a, pp. 152–53).

Paul was also given the essential content of the gospel before the gates of Damascus. Jesus revealed himself to him as the “Son of God” exalted at the right hand of God with the position as “Lord” (Rom. 1:3; 1 Cor. 9:1; Phil. 2:9–11/Ps. 110:1). Through the apostle’s interpretation of 2 Cor. 4:1–6, the gospel “confers the illuminating knowledge of the glory of Christ who—like wisdom in the Old Testament and Jewish tradition—is the manifest and effective image of God to the world” (Stuhlmacher 1991a, p. 155). This glory and ministry exceeds that of the Torah’s (2 Cor. 3:7–11). Paul saw and learned divine glory and power in “the face of the risen and exalted Son of God.” For Stuhlmacher, Jesus turns out to be Lord, and he became the end or telos “of the law as a way of salvation” (cf. Rom. 10:4). Hence, Paul had in his initial calling “the essential content of his gospel in the form of his Torah-critical knowledge of Christ… Paul’s gospel is a Torah-critical gospel of atonement and justification from the time of his Damascus experience, not just after the Galatian troubles!” (Stuhlmacher 1991a, p. 155).12

In relation to tradition, Paul’s non-human revelation of the gospel does not prevent his reception of gospel tradition from earlier Jewish Christ-followers in Damascus, Jerusalem, and Antioch. In 1 Cor. 15:1–5 Paul adopts an apostolic confession from Jerusalem, and he must have been instructed with earlier Christian tradition when baptized (1 Cor. 12:13; cf. Acts 9:17–18). Stuhlmacher considers traditions such as 1 Cor. 11:23–26 and 15:1–5 as valid expressions of Paul’s own Damascus road experience since they bring to him salvific aspects related to the atoning death of Christ and his resurrection, as do other belief statements passed on to him (e.g., Rom. 3:25–26; 4:25; 8:3; 2 Cor. 5:21). Such traditions become the basis for his message of justification that is law-critical; Paul himself experienced a justification of the ungodly. The gospel for Paul is the saving power of God in Romans, and in 2 Corinthians, it is also ministry, the ministry of the Spirit, of righteousness and of reconciliation as the “word of reconciliation” (Stuhlmacher 2018, pp. 277–80). Likewise, texts such as Phil. 1:27 and 1 Thess. 4:1 imply a standard of living related to the gospel that makes Paul’s parenesis an essential part of it: “for him, faith in this Lord embraces both trustful confession and obedient discipleship” (Stuhlmacher 1991a, p. 159; cf. Stuhlmacher 1968, pp. 58–59; 2018, p. 267).

At the same time, Stuhlmacher asserts that Jewish Christian opponents work against Paul by claiming that he received his second- or third-hand gospel from the real apostles who have the true gospel. Paul thus insists on equality and having some independence from Jerusalem’s apostles (Gal. 1–2; 1 Cor. 9). Even so, Rom. 10:9–13 may connect him with the oldest Jerusalem message of calling on the name to be saved based on Joel 3:5[2:28], which he associates with the gospel message and messengers in Rom. 10:15–17 when citing Isa. 52:7 and 53:1. Paul reads the plural from Isa. 52:7 as the apostles being commissioned in Jerusalem, and for Stuhlmacher, the “word of Christ” in Rom. 10:17 refers to Jesus’s authorized commission to his apostles to proclaim the gospel (cp. Acts 1:8; Matt. 28:18–20) (Stuhlmacher 1991a, pp. 159–62). Jesus himself first proclaimed the gospel to the poor, understanding his mission in light of Isa. 61:1–2, a passage evident not only in Q (Matt. 11:2–6/Luke 7:18–23 cf. Luke 4:16–21) but also in the beatitudes (Matt. 5:3–11/Luke 6:20–23). Jesus likewise saw himself as a herald to the kingdom of God (Isa. 52:7; cf. Matt. 4:23; 9:35; 24:24; Mark 1:15) and sent out his disciples with this message understood in light of Isaiah (Matt. 10:1–6/Luke 9:1–6) (Stuhlmacher 1991d, pp. 20–22; 1991a, pp. 163–65).

The character of Paul’s gospel is seen by his phrases of “my gospel” and “our gospel” (1 Thess. 1:5; 2 Cor. 4:3; Rom. 2:16; cf. 16:25; 2 Thess. 2:14; 2 Tim. 2:8). Stuhlmacher suggests that Paul’s gospel had a specific “cast” to it in which he fights for its legitimacy and is not ashamed of it, despite opposition. His rivals charge him with preaching cheap grace, and in response he brings out final judgment through Jesus as an essential part of his gospel (Rom. 2:16; cf. 6:12–23; 14:10–12).13 Although he already received from the baptismal and confessional tradition handed to him “justification through the atoning death of Jesus Christ the servant of God” (2 Cor. 5:21; Rom. 3:25–26; 4:25), he “seized upon this theme and gave unmistakable expression to it in light of his experience of being called (Phil. 3:4–11)” (Stuhlmacher 1991a, p. 167). Paul also arrives at his dialectical view of the law by knowledge of the Jesus tradition as an alternative to “Jewish legalism and Gentile lawlessness” (Gal. 6:2; 1 Cor. 9:21). (Stuhlmacher 1991a, p. 168).

Finally, there is both an “arche” and “telos” to Paul’s gospel. The apostle speaks of Phil. 4:15 as the arche or beginning of his Philippian mission, though the gospel’s real origin rests in the risen Christ’s mandate for his apostles to preach (Paul included), and the geographical matrix for this happened in Jerusalem. The holy city’s prominence as the starting point is clear from both Gal. 2:1–10 and Rom. 15:19. The Jerusalem council negotiations may be the gospel’s “first official definition”, having ecumenical force and validity (Gal. 2:9). The telos of Paul’s gospel will be achieved when the fullness of the nations comes “into the salvation community of Jews and Gentiles”, and Paul presents to God a worthy offering of gentiles (Rom. 11:25; 15:16). After this, “all Israel” receives salvation through Christ (11:26–27). This “entire redemptive historical-apocalyptic concept” closely resembles the words attributed to Jesus in Mark 13:10/Matt. 24:13–14 that the gospel must reach all the nations before the Parousia takes place (Stuhlmacher 1991a, pp. 168–69).

The aftereffects of the Pauline gospel may be viewed in Deutero-Pauline texts, 1 Peter, and Ignatius. The form of gospel as “mystery” in Col. 1:5, 23, 26 and Eph. 6:19 is very similar if not the same as Paul’s view. In 1 Tim. 1:11 (cp. 2 Cor. 4:4) and 2 Tim. 1:6–12 (cp. Rom. 1:3–4), the gospel now becomes “sound doctrine” (1 Tim. 1:10; 2 Tim. 4:3), and what is entrusted from Pauline utterances. The gospel message is very similar both for Peter and Paul in Acts, and Ignatius mingles Paul and Deutero-Paul in his letter to the Philadelphians. In terms of outlook, Stuhlmacher asserts that the noun εὐαγγέλιον cannot be explained in Mark and Matthew purely on Pauline practice. We should look more into Jesus’s own usage, and into Peter whose gospel to Cornelius and gentiles is probably not by happenstance called “gospel” in Acts 15:7 (cf. 10:34–43) (Stuhlmacher 1991a, pp. 169–72).

Stuhlmacher’s studies provide a wealth of important insights about Paul’s gospel and points to its origin through Jesus and Isaianic use. One notices, however, that in later writings, Stuhlmacher backs away from his earlier claim that the gospel in the book of Revelation contributed to the origin of its use in the earliest Jewish Christian community (notice Stuhlmacher 1991a, p. 166, n. 42). Although Stuhlmacher mentions the gospel in relation to Paul’s connection with Peter via Acts, he does not milk Acts for all its worth. Even though it was written later than Paul’s undisputed letters, and it does not reflect Paul’s own vocabulary; as such, this source still needs to be tapped into regarding the gospel’s origin, since it is perhaps our oldest record of Paul remembered (on Pauline remembrance in Acts, see e.g., Dunn 2003, pp. 210–12; Schwemer 2007; White 2014, 2022).14 It also seems difficult to assess Paul’s Damascus road experience as the origin of his gospel without examining that event remembered three different times in Acts and given in far greater detail than we find in Paul’s letters, and less speculative than Stuhlmacher’s attempt to assess that experience through the dense wording of 2 Cor. 4:4–6. Also, Stuhlmacher’s very questionable interpretation of the “end” of the Torah coming early on in Paul’s experience becomes even more questionable if Acts were added to the mix. Along this line, his perception of Jewish “legalism” assumes the old perspective that has been challenged by the new perspective and later interpretations.

3.2. Georg Strecker

When discussing the origin of the term “gospel”, Georg Strecker maintains that the verb εὐαγγελίζω in the NT involves a “nontechnical use [that] is anticipated in the OT … and can be rendered announce (eschatological) salvation…” (Strecker 1990a, vol. 2, p. 69; Strecker 1978–1980).15 But, these OT texts—Isa. 52:7/Nah. 2:1; 61:1—do not warrant scholars deriving the term’s ground simply from here. Nor is it derived from Jewish tradition afterward, which is dependent on these same texts, it seems, for the participle “m^eaaśśēr (“the eschatological message of joy”) (1QH 18:14; 11QMelchizedek 16).” The verb in Greek appears in the Hellenistic literature and takes on a religious sense in Philo regarding the emperor’s coronation or recovery as the verb’s object (Philo Legat. 18, 231), and a religious sense again appears in Philostratus (Vit. Apoll. 1.28; 8.27). This suggests not only an OT Jewish but also Hellenistic linguistic influence on εὐαγγελίζω. The earliest Christian tradition using both verb and noun connect the gospel closely “with christological formulas in the Hellenistic churches” (cp. 1 Cor. 15:1–4; Rom. 1:1–4) (Strecker 1990a, vol. 2, p. 69). Strecker considers it unlikely that Jesus’s proclamations used the Aramaic or Hebrew equivalent to the verb εὐαγγελίζω. For him, only one reference is worth mentioning in this regard—Matt. 11:5 and its parallel—but this reference depends on and is derived from the verb in Isa. 61:1.

Regarding the noun εὐαγγέλιον, Strecker finds it problematic to suggest it originated from the Hebrew Scriptures: the “distance between the OT Jewish tradition and NT use of εὐαγγέλιον is considerable, particularly in view of the fact that the Hebrew and Greek nouns appear in neither the MT nor the LXX with a theological meaning” (Strecker 1990b, vol. 2, p. 71; cf. Strecker 1990a, vol. 2, p. 70).16 NT use should not be traced back to the Jewish Christian community in Palestine but to pre-Pauline tradition such as found in in 1 Thess. 1:9–10 and 1 Cor. 15:1–5; such are dependent on the early Hellenistic church (Strecker 1990b, vol. 2, p. 71). Although the Hellenistic use of the noun may correspond in part with “secular” LXX and Homeric use (i.e., Od. 14.152: “reward for good tidings”), “religious” significance is attached to its meaning through Philo and Josephus. The latter, for example, uses the noun in his Jewish Wars 4.618 where, “the elevation of Vespasian as Caesar is referred to. The combination of εὐαγγέλιον with the cult of Caesar and the offering of sacrifices is known to the world of Josephus, and thus the religious-technical, sacral meaning is also known” (Strecker 1990b, vol. 2, p. 71). This sense related to the emperor is confirmed again in the same writing (J.W. 4.656; cf. 2.420) and in religious inscriptions related to ruler worship, which “indicates that a salvific meaning is associated with εὐαγγέλια (OGIS I, 13, 20 [4th c. BCE]).” Especially important in this regard is the Priene inscription (OGIS II.458; see above). Hence, Strecker concludes that the foremost ground for the NT usage of the noun εὐαγγέλιον “is probably to be found in the circle of the Hellenistic ruler cult… the singular εὐαγγέλιον distinguishes the Christ-event as a unique eschatological fact from all εὐαγγέλια in the non-Christian world” (Strecker 1990b, vol. 2, p. 71).

Strecker poses a formidable challenge to Stuhlmacher, Friedrich, Schniewind, and others who before him argued for the importance of the early Palestinian–Jerusalem community regarding the gospel’s origin. He likewise revitalized the view of the influence of the imperial cult, not only through inscriptions but also the Jewish Hellenistic authors he cites. Strecker highlighted how the gospel term is influenced by the language about the emperor at that time. Along these lines is also Helmut Koester (1992, esp. pp. 2–4; Koester 1989), who dismisses the Isaianic influence and opts instead for Hellenistic kerygmatic claims when it comes to Paul’s gospel, and, like Strecker, he believes that early Christians were influenced by imperial propaganda.

Imperial influence continues to have its effect on gospel interpretation into the twenty-first century. Graham Stanton, for example, supports the imperial cult view by adding the historical setting of Gaius Caligula promoting the “good news” of his accession. This impacted Jews by his attempt to set up his own image in Jerusalem, and it may have served as the fodder needed for Hellenistic Christians to formulate their “counter-story” using gospel terminology, whether in Jerusalem or Antioch around 37–40 CE. Although Jesus may have thought of his calling based on Isaiah 61, the noun form εὐαγγέλιον is not used there. For Stanton, the Hellenists were the first to use εὐαγγέλιον among Christ’s followers, most likely in Antioch: “The content of that proclamation would have been heard by many with the language of the imperial cult ringing in their ears, whether or not that was intended by Christian missionaries and teachers who used this terminology” (Stanton 2004, p. 59, cf. pp. 20–25). It seems that to emphasize this model, though, there is a temptation to play down the influence of the OT prophetic tradition (Koester),17 or at least disassociate εὐαγγέλιον from that influence (Strecker and Stanton).18 A problem with Strecker’s view is that pre-Pauline traditions such as 1 Cor. 15 are said to be the ground for warranting gospel terminology as originating from the Hellenistic church. The Corinthian text, however, may actually be evidence that the gospel goes back to the apostles from Jerusalem. This is because Paul mentions them by name as witnesses of the very resurrection his gospel confesses (1 Cor. 5:5–7). After all, he met both Cephas/Peter and James not very long after his Damascus road experience (Gal. 1:17–20). What would prevent him from receiving this same gospel tradition in 1 Cor. 15:3–5 straight from the “horse’s mouth” rather than indirectly through a Hellenistic congregation?

3.3. Ernst Käsemann and Hubert Frankemölle

In his commentary on Romans, Ernst Käsemann presented an influential interpretation of Paul’s gospel (Käsemann 1980a; Käsemann 1980b, pp. 4–12). He begins by stating that the absolute sense of the singular neuter noun εὐαγγέλιον has yet to be explained in a satisfying way. The word takes on the sense of good news only gradually, though “good tidings” is evident in the Priene inscription. Even so, Käsemann claims that this evidence is insufficient to give account for the absolute use found in the NT. Worship of the emperor was not a major factor in earliest Christ-communities so that their use of the noun had emerged as an imperial antithesis. Moreover, corruption of the Priene inscription at the key point in brackets (εὐανγελί[ων ἡ γενέθλιος ἡμε]ρα τοῦ θεοῦ), which affects “good tidings” and “the birthday”, permits an alternative translation of “joyous sacrifices”. Furthermore, the plural use here does not “directly lead to a singular, which is what Paul uses exclusively” (Käsemann 1980b, p. 7).19 Skepticism towards the imperial cult here centers on the Priene inscription. Käsemann, however, does not address the imperial texts from Philo, Josephus, and other sources.

Käsemann also calls into question the idea that εὐαγγέλιον is derived from Deutero-Isaiah. Although he admits the Isaianic text is eschatological and conveys a sense of salvation—plus the verb and participle can mean “bring good tidings” and “bearer of good tidings”, respectively—the crucial noun form is missing. Whereas similar uses of good tidings may be found Qumran (1QH 18.14), post-biblical Judaism, and perhaps Jewish Christians in Rev. 10:7 and 14:6, Käsemann thinks the tradition (Deutero-Isaianic “good tidings”) is beset with too many problems. It is not broadly used in the NT, it is doubtful that Jesus understood his mission as coming from Deutero-Isaiah, and Revelation’s use is plagued with ambivalence. Likewise, and despite Q (in Matt. 11:5 and Luke 7:22), there is sparing use of the word-group in the Synoptic Gospels (e.g., Mark is missing the verb), which this does not support a Palestinian Christian comprehensive use, and “no direct analogy to the absolute use of the noun in Paul can be found… What all this amounts to is that the Deutero-Isaiah tradition was relatively unimportant and that one cannot speak of its unbroken continuity. This tradition did not attain a dominant place in earliest Jewish Christianity. There was simply a possibility of using it, no more and no less” (Käsemann 1980b, p. 8).

The texts of 1 Cor. 15:1–4 and Rom. 1:1–4, for Käsemann, understand the “gospel” more as teachings being passed on than oral preaching performed in missionary work. Neither text corresponds with Paul’s regular use of the term; thus, these texts must be pre-Pauline. The good news moves from salvation and judgment (as Rev. 14:6) to Christ’s resurrection, lordship, and exaltation. Paul does not initiate but refines the tradition given him, and he sharpens the message with the doctrine of justification. Käsemann then suggests that two demarcations are related to the current debate over the gospel word-group. First, gospel and kerygma are interrelated but are also distinguishable. The distinction comes out clearly in passages such as 1 Cor. 9:16; Romans 1:16; 11:28; 15:16, 19, among others, that understand the gospel “as power that determines life and destiny, just as the λόγος τοῦ θεοῦ is personified as an independent entity… The Christ event both precedes the message… and continues itself in the message” (Käsemann 1980b, p. 9). Second, Rom. 1:2 “anchors the gospel in salvation history… God made known his will for the gospel in the past through the Old Testament prophets”. In these scriptures, the notion of promise, such as in the Abrahamic passages in Gal. 3 and Rom. 4, is seen as a “prototype of the gospel even as the law is its antithesis”, and Christ is the gospel’s decisive content, but not its author (Käsemann 1980b, p. 9).

Hubert Frankemölle, who focuses on the gospel in relation to its literary form or Gattung, concludes his study with pessimism towards the argument that Christians derived the gospel from Isaiah or Roman imperialism (Caesar cult) or early Palestinian–Jewish Christians. This is similar to Käsemann. In response to the idea that Jesus saw himself as the Isaianic messenger, Frankemölle writes that this is “nicht mehr als eine Vermutung” (nothing more than a guess) (Frankemölle 1988, p. 207).20 Early Hellenistic missionaries, who were precursors to Mark and Paul, altered the gospel language from a verb to a noun as the sum of the Christ event and missionary proclamation; such was the sum of Jesus’s own preaching, among other things (e.g., Mark 1:15; cf. 14:9) (Frankemölle 1988, p. 207, cf. pp. 131–59).

Käsemann and Frankemölle appear to be right that Paul refines an earlier gospel than his own. He also makes justification prominent in his gospel. But, I suspect that attaching the gospel’s influence onto Hellenistic Christ-followers may not be the proper center, or at least not the only center. I also have grave doubts about Käsmann’s and Frankemölle’s pessimism towards the gospel in Deutero-Isaiah as a major influence on NT texts. That is because even apart from Matt. 11:5 and Luke 7:22, the beatitudes in Matt. 5:3–5 and Luke 6:20–21 reflect Isa. 61:1, placing it at the very core of Jesus’s teachings. Also, the message of the good news is found at the heart of Mark’s Gospel (Mark 1:1–15), and given his quote in Mark 1:3, this gospel language surely comes from Isaiah 40:3–9. This makes Isaiah a primary influence on Jesus’s gospel in Mark (see e.g., Watts 1997; Jensen 2023, pp. 213–19, 265–66). Beyond this, Isa. 61:1 is cited in Luke 4:14–21, making it central to Jesus’s Spirit-filled mission in this particular Gospel, and this guiding text also has ramifications for the way we are to read the message proclaimed by the disciples in Acts. Hence, all three Gospels seem to make the Isaianic gospel central to Jesus’s messages.21 Regarding Paul, his double quote of the gospel from Isa. 52:7 and 53:1 in Rom. 10:9–17 likewise comes at a crucial moment in this letter, a letter that happens to be identified as his gospel (Rom. 1:1–4, 15–16; 15:15–16).

4. Paul’s Gospel Interpreters: Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Century

4.1. The New Perspective on Paul

With E. P. Sanders came the “new perspective” on Paul and a shift in Pauline thinking from assuming that the Jewish view of Paul’s day was marked by works-righteousness. Rather, the various texts from Second-Temple Palestinian Judaism recognize a religion based on covenantal nomism—the center of which focused on God’s election of Israel by grace rather than their achievements. Jewish obedience to Mosaic law, then, was not for the purpose of “getting in” a covenant relationship with God and thereby hoping to be saved, but “staying in” that covenant (e.g., Sanders 1977, pp. 75, 180, 420–22, 543; 1983). Paul’s criticisms in reference to the Torah were not about the impossibility of obeying the law, but that his newly found relationship led him to believe that Christ, not the Torah, provided the way to salvation. He wanted to make sure that his gentile converts, who “cannot live by the law”, would not be reduced to second-class citizenship in comparison with their Jewish counterparts in Christ (Sanders 1977, p. 496, cf. pp. 519, 550, 552; 1983, pp. 47, 153–54). This new perspective came to be adopted by other scholars, especially James D. G. Dunn and N. T. Wright (Oropeza and McKnight 2020, pp. 1–23).

4.1.1. E. P. Sanders

For Sanders, Paul’s gospel and phrases, such as the “gospel of God” (1 Thess. 2:2, 8–9; cf. Rom. 1:1; 15:16; 2 Cor. 11:7), “gospel of Christ” (2 Cor. 2:12; cf. Rom. 15:19; 2 Cor. 9:13; Gal. 1:7), “word of God” (Phil. 1:14), “word of the cross” (1 Cor. 1:18), and “word of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:19), suggest that Paul’s message focused on God’s action and the content of Christ’s death and resurrection (1 Cor. 1:23; 15:1–15). Sanders adduces from these statements that Paul’s message did not center on human plight but “what God had done in Christ.” This in turn supports Sanders’s notion that Paul’s thought and preaching ran from solution to plight rather than plight to solution (Sanders 1977, p. 444, cf. pp. 442–43, 445–47).22 The gospel is also directly connected with Sanders’s view of participation in Christ: “the main theme of Paul’s gospel was the saving action of God in Jesus Christ and how his hearers could participate in that action”, and “faith” is the primary word for that participation, a “human participation in God’s saving action”, which is the heart of Pauline soteriology (Sanders 1977, p. 447).

In his later work (Sanders 2015, pp. 189–90, cf. pp. 114–23), Sanders identifies the “simple gospel” of Paul, which stands over a more complicated form his messages might take when opposing other Christian leaders or grave arguments arising from his own congregants. The simple gospel is made up of the following tenets:

• Gentile conversion from their worship of idols to the Jewish God (1 Thess. 1:9);
• Acceptance of this God’s Son, Jesus Christ, who died for them and rose again from the dead, and will return (1 Thess. 1:10);
• Jewish acceptance and faith in God’s Son as savior, and their need to await the second coming;
• The Son’s return marks a great judgment in which those who believe in him will escape divine wrath and have life eternal;
• In the process of this anticipation, those who believe are to live blameless lives (1 Thess. 5:23; 3:13) and love others (3:12; 4:9; 5:8).

Here, Sanders relies mostly on Paul’s early letter, 1 Thessalonians, with its emphases on an imminent second coming and proclaiming a monotheistic message to polytheistic pagan worshippers. Sanders asserts that Paul’s belief in the imminent return waned in later years as more believers died, though it still can be found as late as in Rom. 13:11–14. Paul started to place a new emphasis on the resurrection. The gospel message thus shifted to the following tenets: “(1) God had sent his Son; (2) he suffered and died by crucifixion for the benefit of humanity; (3) he was raised and was now in heaven; (4) he would soon return; and (5) those who belonged to him would live with him forever” (Sanders 2015, p. 119, cf. p. 209).

Sanders’s interpretation of Paul’s gospel not only connects Paul’s soteriology with participation in Christ but it also helped pave the way for understanding that soteriology in connection with the sociological dimension pertaining to Jewish and gentile relationships. Moreover, his “simple gospel” stresses the importance of Christians living in a blameless way. As such, they are to live in a way worthy of the gospel (Phil. 1:27; 1 Thess. 2:12) and not fall away from the “the word of life” and “gospel of Christ” so that Paul’s labor among his converts would not be in vain (Phil. 2:12–16; 1 Thess. 3:2–5). The shift in Paul’s gospel that Sanders discusses has some merit. But, is it really the case that resurrection was not emphasized early on? We find a stress on Jesus’s death and resurrection in 1 Cor. 15.3–4 and Rom. 1:3–4, and these belief statements appear to be pre-Pauline, as most scholars suggest. Perhaps Paul learned them when first meeting some of the other apostles (Gal. 1:16–19; cf. Acts 9:26–28). This would be many years before he wrote 1 Thessalonians. On the issue of the Parousia’s imminency, we wonder whether Paul’s own near-death ordeals (2 Cor. 1:8–11) prompted fewer discussions on the topic in his later letters. Or was it simply his respective letters’ situations that determined for him whether or not he would discuss the second coming? Once we assume that the future resurrection and final judgment belong with the Parousia, then Paul’s end-time discussions may have never waned, and Rom. 13:11–14 is a text to that effect, as are Phil. 2:16; 3:20–21; 4:5; Rom. 2:1–16; 8:19–23; 11:25–27; and 2 Cor. 4:14–17 and 5:10.

4.1.2. James D. G. Dunn

James D. G. Dunn popularized among scholars the phrase “the new perspective on Paul”, and his interest in Paul’s gospel was piqued by wanting to know whether it was really polarized from Jewish law as the traditional Lutheran perspective assumed. Did this gospel re-express centuries of divine summoning to Israel or did it break with what went before it? His study finds both continuity and discontinuity with regard to the question (Dunn 1994, pp. 367–88; 2008, pp. 247–64, esp. p. 249).23

Regarding continuity, he follows Stuhlmacher in affirming that the early Christian use of the gospel was derived from Jesus’s own use in reference to Jewish Scripture, particularly, Isaiah 61:1–2 (Matt. 11:5/Luke 7:22; Luke 4:18; Acts 10:36; Luke 6:20–21/Matt. 5:3–4), a text that even influenced other Jewish traditions (e.g., PsSol. 11.1; 1QH 23[18].14; 11QMelch 18). Second, Dunn claims that “the truth of gospel” comes into focus with the righteousness of God and is expressed in justification through faith in Jesus (Rom. 1:17; Gal. 2:14–16). These ideas are rooted in Second Isaiah and Psalms, and this righteousness consists in God’s act of saving and sustaining Israel (e.g., Isa. 45:8, 21; 51:5–8; 62:1–2; Ps. 98:2; 143:11). Paul’s gospel is thus for the Jew first, and its integral outworking is exhibited in Hab. 2:4: “the righteous from faith shall live”. Third, Paul’s gospel is the “gospel of God” promised through the prophets in Jewish Scripture (Rom. 1:1–2; cf. 15:16; 2 Cor. 11:7; 1 Thess. 2:2, 8–9). It was also proclaimed to Abraham (Gal. 3:8), already existing at that time and pertaining to the promise made to the patriarch that other nations (gentiles) would be blessed in him (Gen. 12:3; 18:18). Fourth, for Paul, the key example of justification by faith is none other than Abraham (Rom. 4; Gal. 3) (Dunn 2008, pp. 249–53).

Regarding the gospel’s discontinuity with what went before, Paul advances the centrality of the death and resurrection of Jesus as the Messiah; the “cross” becomes the breaking point in apocalyptic history from old to new creation (Gal. 6:14–15; 2 Cor. 5:16–21). There is also a dying to the law (Gal. 2:19; cf. 2 Cor. 3:7–18; Rom. 7:1–4), and a shift from death to life (Rom. 6:3–6). The scheme of two distinct worlds is now present (Gal. 1:4), which is also found in Jesus traditions (Matt. 12:32; Mark 10:30; Luke 20:34–35). There is also a stress on things such as the dynamic Spirit centered in Christ, the gospel’s reception among the nations through Christ, and the notion of being “under grace” rather than “under the law” (Rom. 6:14–15; Gal. 3:23–4:7) (Dunn 2008, pp. 253–64). At the same time, divine disclosure is emphasized in which Paul could affirm that even though confession of the gospel came to him from other apostles (1 Cor. 15:1–11), he did not ultimately receive his gospel from humans but by revelation of Christ (Gal. 1:11–16: cf. 2 Cor. 4:4–6).

For Dunn, although the Damascus road experience comes with the unique calling for Paul to be an apostle proclaiming the gospel to the gentiles, this did not mean that his focus centered immediately on the law as result. Rather, the significant factors involved his prophet-like calling to the nations, his turn from zealous persecutor to follower of those whom he opposed, and his “continued recognition of the law, not as a life-giver, but as an orderer of life for the people of God…”; in other words, the law’s role “was to regulate life already given, not to give life where none was before” (Dunn 1998, pp. 178–79 with 154). He also points out that Paul’s “conversion” was not from one religion (Judaism) to another (Christianity), but it was from one of his people’s sects to another—from Pharisee to Nazarene. As such, it was a conversion of his theology, a change of axioms, such as his older views of Israel’s “status and the importance of preserving it”, and his conclusion that Jesus was a messianic pretender (Dunn 1998, p. 179).

Paul proclaimed his gospel to pagans in their cities starting with the aim of getting them to turn from idols to serve the living God (1 Thess. 1:9) and with his main emphases on Jesus Christ and him crucified and raised from the dead, along with promoting his lordship (Rom. 10:9; cf. 1 Cor. 1:23; 15:1–5; Rom. 1:3–4; Gal. 3:1). Also, his messages were about the Parousia, justification by faith, reception of the Spirit, participation in Christ, the Lord’s dinner, and instruction on how to live out the gospel (Dunn 2009a, pp. 573–87; Dunn 2014, pp. 142–53). Regarding Jesus’s death as gospel, this was “good news” because Christ died “for our sins” (1 Cor. 15:3), which Paul understood as a sin offering with the blood of Jesus having saving efficacy (Rom. 3:25, 5:9, 8:3; 1 Cor. 11:25; 2 Cor. 5:21; Col. 1:20). For Dunn, this is far removed from the image of death that appeases an angry God; rather, it has God putting forward Jesus as the sacrificial atonement that proves God’s love for sinners (Rom. 5:8; cf. 3:25) (Dunn 2014, pp. 140–42). Nevertheless, for Dunn, all these belief statements about the gospel were hardly declared in a vacuum. Paul proclaimed an entire narrative about Jesus leading up to his death and resurrection: “The gospel that converted so many Gentiles could hardly have been simply that an unidentified X had died and been raised from the dead. On the contrary, since new believers in Paul’s gospel were beginning to be called ‘Christians’ (Acts 11:26), and were baptized in the name of Christ (cf. 1 Cor. 1:12–15), they would inevitably have been prompted to ask more about this ‘Christ’” (Dunn 2014, p. 141).

Regarding the development of the gospel to the Gospels, Dunn concurs with scholars who associate Isa. 52:7 and 61:1 with what Jesus said in his first beatitude (“blessed are the poor”: Luke 6:20) and in response to John the Baptist (Luke 7:22–23). Even so, the use of the neuter noun εὐαγγέλιον as the gospel about Jesus originated with Paul, who “saw it as entirely natural to express the message which he believed Christ had commissioned him to preach as ‘gospel’, as the noun content of the verbal action, as the euangelion which he was commissioned euangelizesthai” (Dunn 2013, p. 293). In response to the notion that εὐαγγέλιον appears in pre-Pauline gospel traditions such as Rom. 1:3–4 and 1 Cor. 15:1–5, Dunn replies that the gospel term itself does not belong to the pre-Pauline formulae; rather, Paul is the one who attached the term “gospel” onto these formulae (Dunn 2013, p. 293, n. 14).24 Mark’s Gospel then used the noun after Paul; Mark’s use helped change the word “gospel” into a story about Jesus instead of merely words about his death and resurrection (Dunn 2013, pp. 295–96). With Mark 1:1, we begin to see the term “gospel” segue from the life and death of Jesus (the gospel’s content) to a written book about Jesus. A new genre was thus birthed that became more than merely a biography of an extraordinary man but a “Gospel”, Mark’s Gospel. Next, without adopting Markan use of “gospel”, the three other evangelists followed suit by adopting the Markan pattern of writing a “passion narrative with an extended introduction” (Dunn 2013, p. 298).25

We see in Dunn a new perspective approach that factors in how Jewish thought plays into the early gospel of the Christ-community in terms of continuity and discontinuity. The importance of the gospel’s relation to Israel’s Scripture plays a major role here. His view that Abraham is a key figure in the gospel of righteousness, I think, implicitly gravitates us away from assumptions that Paul’s discussion of this patriarch in Gal. 3 and Rom. 4 are simply ad hoc arguments against his opponents in these communities. This is not to say that Paul never encountered anyone who brought up Abraham as a model for circumcision and ethnic distinctiveness. Rather, I imagine that he experienced scriptural push-back of this sort quite frequently when speaking in synagogues prior to writing these letters. If so, then whenever Paul proclaimed the gospel before biblically informed audiences, the notion of Abraham’s righteousness by faith/trust may have been typically brought up, especially in relation to gentile circumcision. In other words, even prior to Paul’s extant letters, Abraham probably was already a staple figure in his gospel of God’s righteousness.

A crucial point Dunn raises is that Paul did not simply proclaim belief statements about Jesus; he had to have known and presented the more complete narratives behind such statements for such statements to even make sense before uninformed gentiles. One such narrative is developed in Mark’s “gospel” that eventually becomes Mark’s “Gospel”. I disagree, however, that Paul originated the noun use of εὐαγγέλιον among Christians. Although Dunn argues that the apostle himself tagged this noun onto his pre-Pauline formulae, we must probe further to ask what term would have been used by the apostles to identify such formulae before Paul. I suspect that they, too, would have used the noun “gospel” (if not εὐαγγέλιον then perhaps an equivalent, e.g., בשורתא). Moreover, if Romans 1:3–4 is pre-Pauline, then Paul’s use of the noun in Rom. 1:1 seems to assume that his Roman recipients were already familiar with connecting εὐαγγέλιον to such formulae. Since this was the first time Paul communicated with them, it suggests that they knew this connection independent of Paul—they must have learned it first from other apostles, evangelists, or missionaries. My thoughts here are complementary with the way εὐαγγέλιον is used in Acts. There, it was perhaps remembered through the voice of Peter at the Jerusalem meeting when speaking about his earlier message to Cornelius’s household (Acts 15:7), a use that may be corroborated by Paul in Gal. 2:7–8 when referring to that same meeting.

4.1.3. N. T. Wright

N. T. Wright asks where the gospel comes from and how it is echoed by Paul for the readers to hear. Important for him in this regard are Isa. 40:9 and 52:7 that advance a contextual double theme—the Lord’s return to Zion with enthronement and Israel’s return from Babylonian exile (Wright 1994, pp. 223–24). These texts in relation to Israel’s exilic plight and return were also echoed in Second Temple traditions (PsSol. 11:1; 1QH 18.14–15; 11QMelch. II.15–24). Equally, the gospel maintained a sense of being “news of victory” in the Greco-Roman world and, more particularly, an imperial announcement of the emperor’s birth and accession. Wright considers it a false dichotomy that NT interpreters must decide between these two ideas for the gospel. He suggests instead that the historical context of Paul’s gospel means that the “more Jewish we make Paul’s ‘gospel’, the more it confronts directly the pretensions of the imperial cult and indeed all other paganisms, whether ‘religious’ or ‘secular’” (Wright 1994, p. 228 [italics in the original]). This is because royal claims are all-embracing, whether for Caesar or Israel’s God; hence, “To announce that YHWH is king is to announce that Caesar is not” (Wright 1994, p. 228; cp. Wright 2000, pp. 160–83; Wright 2013, pp. 169–90, 237–54, 324–25). Wright more recently confirms that the good news has to do with the covenant-making God fulfilling “his ancient promises and is now rescuing his people from the slavery caused by their own sin, defeating the pagan empire that has held them captive, and sending them home to their promised land” (Wright 2014, p. 915). By doing this, God reveals his glory, salvation, righteousness, and sovereign royalty. This all happened through the Isaianic servant whose suffering and death effects remission of sin and freedom for God’s people; the gospel in Isa. 52:7 points to the servant in Isa. 52:13–53:12. But, the gospel’s other context is the world of Caesar, and in that world, he reigns supreme. As such, Paul’s gospel, then, denotes the fulfillment of prophetic Scripture and an “implicit confrontation with the newer imperial realities” by declaring the gospel of God’s kingdom “in and through the life, messianic achievement, and supremely the death and resurrection of Jesus” (Wright 2014, pp. 915–16).

Paul’s gospel likewise is both a message about the true God in contrast to false deities and a message about the Christ (Messiah), the king of Israel and the world. The gospel in Galatians in particularly refers to a complex set of beliefs and announcements, though not an individualistic and ahistorical message about “how one gets saved”. Rather, it is an announcement (1) of the God of Israel as the one true God; (2) of Jesus as the one crucified and resurrected, and he is not simply “Lord” in a cosmic sense but the actual king of Israel; (3) of Israel’s exile being over and salvation arrived; and (4) of pagan idol rule as now broken (Wright 1994, p. 232). For Wright, Jews understood that Israel in Paul’s day had not been redeemed as expected. The only fulfillment of a prophetic return from exile took place with the crucified and risen Jesus, and it is through him that the one family promised in Abraham is now being fulfilled with all the nations blessed and bearing the distinguishing mark of faith (Gal. 3:8). The gospel is thus an announcement of Jesus’s kingship, and “‘justification by faith’ reminds those who, abandoning their varied idolatries, have given their allegiance to Jesus”. This same allegiance “is the only distinguishing mark by which the renewed and united family of Abraham is to be known” (Wright 1994, p. 236).

In reference to Romans, Wright affirms that Rom. 1:3–4 refers to the content of the gospel, which is about Jesus Messiah (his sonship, his dying and rising, and his lordship over the world). But, the effect of the gospel is described in Rom. 1:16–17: God’s power that brings salvation and God’s “covenant justice” being unveiled in it.26 Among other things, when this gospel announcement occurs, “the creator God is shown to be ‘in the right’ in that he has kept his promises” and “people of all sorts, Jew and Greek alike ‘receive ‘salvation’ as a result of divine power” (Wright 2014, pp. 916–17). The gospel in fact was central to Paul, his vocation, and worldview (Rom. 1:1, 16; 1 Cor. 1:17, 9:16, 23, 15:1–2; 2 Cor. 4:4; Gal. 1:11, 2:5; Eph. 3:8; Phil. 1:27; etc.): “The gospel, the gospel, the gospel. It defined Paul. It defined his work. It defined his communities. It was the shorthand summary of the theology which, in turn, was the foundation for the central pillar for the new worldview. It carried God’s power” (Wright 2014, p. 411, cf. p. 410).

Wright’s new perspective on the Jewishness of Paul’s gospel is seen by his stress on the Isaianic influence on the apostle. He also emphasizes Paul’s interaction with the imperial cult as “implicit confrontation”. His view thus features and affirms influence on the gospel from both Isaiah and the imperial cult, which breaks through the stalemate between scholars like Stuhlmacher and Koester (both supporting more of an “either–or” approach). Regarding Wright’s “implicit confrontation” of imperial realities, this seems to suggest that Paul emphasized εὐαγγέλιον to critique Roman imperialism. But if so, I must wonder whether he would need to be subversive about it. When Paul wants to critique imperial officials, he seems to do so without trepidation. In 1 Cor. 2:6–8, he openly criticizes the powers of the Empire and not only places on them culpability for Jesus’s death but also mentions their future destruction.27 On the other hand, he can also be amiable towards the empire, as in Romans 13:1–7 (which creates headaches for those who overstate empire criticism). Perhaps Paul is not so much against Roman empire as he is simply for the gospel he proclaims, which necessitates the promotion of a superior empire. For him, the kingdom of God reigns above all human powers, which of course includes imperial Rome (Rom. 10:2; 1 Cor. 15:24–27; Col. 2:10; Eph. 1:21). All the same, with imperial propaganda “in the air”, Paul probably did consider it advantageous to use “good news” terminology; his gentile audiences would be able to understand it easily enough as the presentation of an alternative kingdom.

4.2. The Apocalyptic Paul

At virtually the same time, the new perspective became prominent, and so the apocalyptic perspective of scholars like J. Louis Martyn, J. Christiaan Beker, Martinus C. de Boer, and others, with Ernst Käsemann as the forerunner. This view places apocalypticism at its center, which is marked by God’s invasion of the world that exposes a radical turn of ages taking place through Christ’s death and resurrection, involving human liberation, a new order of reality, and inaugurating a battle culminating in the defeat of enemy powers, among other things (e.g., Gaventa 2007, p. 81; De Boer 2016, p. 51; Davies 2022). It not only applies to the end times and the Lord’s Parousia, but also in relation to Paul, his proclamation of the gospel, and the faith it produces: “The whole of God’s saving activity in Jesus Christ, from beginning to end, is apocalyptic” (De Boer 2002, p. 21; De Boer 2020).

4.2.1. J. Christiaan Beker and J. Louis Martyn

Apocalyptic constitutes “the heart of the Paul’s gospel” according to J. Christiaan Beker, “inasmuch as all that is said about Christ refers to the that process of salvation which will imminently climax in the regnum Dei” (Beker [1980] 1984, p. 17). His apocalyptic theology features the triumph of God, which is God’s anticipated victory and redemption of the cosmos, inaugurated in the Christ event. The triumph is eschatologically focused because, in the end, death and evil will be defeated, and God’s kingdom and majestic glory will be fully manifest. Moreover, God’s triumph is considered the “coherent theme” of the gospel, a theme that provides this gospel with “its dynamic, explosive character and future horizon” (Beker [1980] 1984, p. 355; cf. pp. 354, 362, 366; Beker 1982). For Beker, Paul’s conversion was absorbed by the more prominent reality of his commission to declare the gospel among the gentiles regarding the “new state of affairs” in Christ. That gospel reflects both “the content of preaching and the act of preaching”; in Paul’s letters, “content, direct address, and obedience coincide” (cf. Gal. 3:1–5; Rom. 1:5, 10:14–15) (Beker [1980] 1984, p. 122; cf. pp. 6, 8). Such a proclamation is both theocentric (“gospel of God”) and christocentric (“gospel of Christ”), which are fused into “the one cosmic-redemptive purpose of God for which Christ died and was raised” (Beker [1980] 1984, p. 8).28

For J. Louis Martyn, the importance of apocalyptic underscores that Paul’s good news is in the singular rather than plural (εὐαγγέλιον, not εὐαγγέλια); this connotes its unrepeatedness. In Galatians, the gospel is not “one piece of good news alongside others. It begins the new history by terminating the old history, together with all its editions of good news. In a word, the Galatians will not have heard Paul preaching an instance of good news. They will have heard him proclaiming the thoroughly eschatological, once-for-all good new that breaks the mold of good news” (Martyn 1997, p. 130, cf. p. 127). Sensitive to the hermeneutic of Paul’s Galatian readers as gentiles, Martyn keeps in the forefront of his interpretation how they would have heard the glad tidings proclamation. They would have noticed several things about its uniqueness:

(1)

It is non-repeatable (as already expressed above).

(2)

It has the power to save and it invades human hearts being empowered by the Spirit (cf. Gal. 3:2, 5 and 4:6).

(3)

It is an event in which God’s powerful self “comes on the scene, speaking his own word-event”.

(4)

It involves the cross; unlike other Hellenistic cults, this god’s death becomes good news.

(5)

It is an apocalypse, pointing to a new epoch (new creation), not the present evil age. It is marked by two periods of time, unlike the emperor cult.

(6)

It involves an epistemological crisis. This good news breaks forth without visible signs such as a military victory, peace declarations, or prosperity; the world remains unchanged externally, creating such a crisis. The gospel is seen not where one expects but where one does not expect: “of the Spirit’s war against the Impulsive Desire of the Flesh, and of the Spirit’s fruit, its power to create even now the loving community of the end-time, the new creation …. Thus, God’s new deed is to be seen in the miracle of this new community” (Martyn 1997, p. 132, cf. pp. 130–31).

For Martyn, the glad tidings of Paul are thus not a movement about human blissfulness but “God’s liberating invasion of the cosmos”, and the love of Christ exhibited on the cross has the capability of transforming the world “because it is embodied in the new community of mutual service” (Martyn 2000, p. 246). Through the power of the word of this gospel, God makes right things that have gone wrong, and this is not through the law but by “the faith of Christ, his death on our behalf ([Gal.] 2:16)”, and this good news of Christ involves also “power that elicits faith”, thus playing a role in the divine gift of the Spirit (Martyn 2000, p. 252).

What apocalyptic theologians are good at reminding us of is that Paul’s gospel is countercultural, having a new creation breaking into the present corrupt world. At the same time, we must wonder whether the singular εὐαγγέλιον was so unique to the ears of Paul’s auditors that it would evoke for them the notion of a “once and for all” activity. Had they never run into the singular use before, not even when reading or hearing Homer? Hypothetically speaking, if they had known Josephus, would they have attributed the same significance to his singular use? Martyn’s “faith of Christ” in Gal. 2:16 opens up an ongoing debate on whether Paul means the subjective genitive use, as Martyn, or objective genitive (“faith in Christ”), or some third way of interpreting the phrase πίστις Χριστοῦ. This issue makes further impact through Douglas Campbell’s interpretation below.

4.2.2. Beverly Roberts Gaventa

For Beverly Roberts Gaventa, Paul’s “news” is not merely about the arrival of God’s messiah, but what this arrival unveils regarding the human situation and all creation. This gospel is theocentric (Gaventa 1991, p. 150) and it is divine power bringing about salvation (Rom. 1:16). Apocalyptic features are noticeably strong in the second part of Romans, that is, chapters 5–8 (Gaventa 2019). Starting in Rom. 1:17, Paul explicates why the gospel power is needed. He sets out first to establish that Jews and gentiles are in captivity to Sin (Rom. 3:9), and that captivity can be traced back to Adam and the world-encompassing powers of Sin and Death (5:12–21). Hence, the death and resurrection of Christ marks the defeat of such powers (Rom. 6:12–21). This event likewise means “the hope of the liberation of all creation (8:18–25), although the powers persist in their resistance to God’s love brought about in Christ Jesus (8:31–39)” (Gaventa 2024, p. 13). In keeping with apocalytic, then, Paul’s gospel is not merely about gentile inclusion or Israel’s promises being fulfilled; it reclaims the cosmos “in the thrall of Sin and Death” (Gaventa 2024, p. 13).

Most scholars affirm that Paul adopts or modifies a creedal formula when speaking about the gospel of God in in Rom. 1:3–4. A significant distinction Beverly Roberts Gaventa makes on this passage is that, contrary to these scholars, Paul may be crafting his own gospel definition, “incorporating some expressions he anticipates will be familiar to the Roman congregations, and anticipating explication of the summary in vv. 16–17 and much more elaborately in the body of the letter to follow” (Gaventa 2024, p. 27). This interpretation helps unify the letter’s content with these belief statements. It also makes better sense than to suggest that the apostle’s adoption of a pre-existing creed just happens to work so fittingly with his letter’s themes.

As far as Romans is concerned, the apocalyptic perspective is indeed compelling in the middle chapters. Here is where the cosmic powers of Sin and Death ruin everything, and the plight of those who trust in Jesus Christ signals a gravitation back to God that involves a complete restoration not only of Jews and gentiles but also the entire cosmos. Regarding the gospel in Rom. 1:3–4, Gaventa considers this to originate with Paul. Differently, I side with those who see a pre-Pauline creedlet here. Gaventa writes that in these verses, Paul adopts expressions of what he thinks would be “familiar” to the Romans. This for me suggests that some of the wording may not be typically Paul’s, and this prompts further inquiry. Where and from whom had they heard such wording before? As a number of scholars suggest—and I agree—the Roman Christ-community finds its origin from visits to Jerusalem and interacting with Christ’s followers there (e.g., Acts 2:10–11). This suggests to me that the oral phrases Paul may be using here to accommodate the Romans are belief statements he himself adopted when in Jerusalem, whether from the apostles or Hellenistic Christ-community there. If the entire content of these verses was not already written or memorized in its present form, then I suspect that Paul may have put together at least some of the content we find in these verses from individual statements that were pre-Pauline and originating from Jerusalem.

That he considers this content “gospel” appears to be because he thinks the Romans are already familiar with the term εὐαγγέλιον and its relation to the beliefs he unfolds in these verses. This is a way he could build rapport with them without ever meeting them in person—he wants them to be reassured that he shares the same gospel beliefs they do. We thus may have in Rom. 1:1–4 pre-Pauline belief statements and a pre-Pauline εὐαγγέλιον identifying this small collection of such statements.

4.2.3. Douglas A. Campbell

Influenced by the apocalyptic character of Martyn’s theology, and akin with the prominence Gaventa places on the section, Douglas A. Campbell interprets Romans 5–8 as central to Paul and his letter (Campbell 2009, 2012a).29 In his view, however, much of what is written in Rom. 1:18–4:25 is not Paul’s own position but his opponent’s, the Teacher, a Jewish Christian who seems to resemble the theological position that Campbell wishes to oppose. In Campbell’s view, Romans 1–4 has often been misread by those who hold to Justification Theory (JT), a tragic and damaging “gospel” proclaimed by many that reads Paul in terms of a contractual mode of salvation, retributive justification, and conditional human faith. Campbell interprets such a perspective from the early chapters of Romans. Most notably, he reads Rom. 1:18–32 as the words of Paul’s opponent, written rhetorically by Paul as prosopopoeia (though now Socratic irony), to which Paul responds sporadically throughout these chapters.30

The real gospel, on the other hand, is supposed to be characterized by unconditionality, liberating justification, and the faithfulness of Christ. To support this reading, Campbell, inter alia, interprets the pivotal text of Rom. 1:17, and its citation of Habakkuk 2:4, not as “the righteous shall live by faith” or “right-by-faith person shall live”, but as “the Righteous One [Messiah = Jesus] by faithfulness shall live.” This intimates the resurrection of Christ, his centrality in salvation, and that his faithfulness—not human faith—as the means to deliverance (similarly, Rom 3:21–26). God’s righteousness is here “the deliverance of God” that denotes “a singular, saving, liberating, life-giving, eschatological act of God in Christ” (Campbell 2009, p. 702; cf. pp. 699, 840).

The content of Romans 5–8 teaches that God sent his only Son to die for enemies and retrieve them. Since God’s Spirit now lives within them, three persons are thus recognized, which implements a Trinitarian theology, though not named as such by Paul. The triune God is known in the act of redemption, and humanity contributes nothing to this process; it cannot rescue itself (Rom. 7) but is utterly depraved and yet redeemed by grace unconditionally. Liberation has arrived via the Spirit, and the communal reality of being in Christ and possessed by the Spirit of God and Christ “is both to live and to live rightly” (Campbell 2012b, p. 138). Among other things, Campbell abbreviates his model for the apostle’s approach as PPME: a “pneumatologically participatory martyrological eschatological” model (Campbell 2005, p. 4). Such is the correct gospel of Paul, according to Campbell, and it is a gift, a revelation from God to humans that is focused on Jesus. Its starting point for Paul happened near Damascus (Gal. 1:12; cf. vv. 1, 11, 15–16), a gospel that was proclaimed to Paul by revelation “of and by Jesus Christ” when Christ got a hold of Paul (Phil. 3:12; cf. Gal. 4:9): “Christ’s revelation is the proclamation, and there is no other” (Campbell and DePue 2024, p. 30).

Campbell’s position has been met with criticism (e.g., Matlock 2011; Macaskill 2011; contributors in Tilling 2014), though it also finds some supporters, depending on the issue (e.g., Van Driel 2021). Campbell’s reading of Rom. 1–4, especially in relation to the voice of Paul’s opponent, finds few supporters, not the least of which reasons are that one can find elsewhere a number of Pauline texts that support retributive justice and divine wrath (e.g., Rom. 12:19; 1 Cor. 3:10–17, 10:5–12; 1 Thess. 2:13–16, 5:1–9; 2 Thess. 1:6–10, 2:10–12). Another problematic set of texts can be found in Paul that make human faith in some sense conditional and support the real potential for believers to commit apostasy and fall into divine judgment if that faith is lost and/or vices are practiced (e.g., 1 Cor. 8:11–13, 10:12; Gal. 5:2–4, 19–21; Phil. 2:12; Col. 1:21–23; Oropeza 2012). Another problem is that the Messianic identity for the righteous one in Rom. 1:17 (Hab. 2:4) is a very doubtful interpretation, despite vigorous arguments by Campbell and others attempting to support it. As I have argued elsewhere, the Romans would not be able to comprehend such a reading given the way πίστ-words are used in this particular context; every time the words appear in Rom. 1:1–17, they pertain to people like Paul and the Romans, not Christ (Oropeza 2021). More commendable are Campbell’s emphases on the importance of participation in Christ and the Holy Spirit in Paul’s gospel. I think it imprudent, however, to create an “either/or” position regarding a so-called harmful gospel that supports a traditional reading of justification by faith against an allegedly correct PPME gospel. It can be “both/and”, despite protests to contrary. If so, then Campbell’s view in this regard may be acceptable in what it supports but unacceptable in what it denies.

4.3. Paul and Missiology

Mission relevant to the New Testament, according to Eckhard Schnabel, is “the activity of a community of faith that distinguishes itself from its environment in terms of both religious belief (theology) and social behavior (ethics), that is convinced of the truth claims of its faith, and that actively works to win other people to the content of faith and to the way of life of whose truth and necessity the members of that community are convinced” (Schnabel 2002, vol. 1, p. 11). This understanding points to the community’s activity rather than simply the content and efficacy of the gospel message it presents. Although missionary activity is concerned with presenting the good news, it more widely includes a strategy for outreach to non-community neighbors, and is commissioned by Jesus Christ for the task of establishing new communities in Christ. Its tactical actions include travelling to different cities, towns, and villages for outreach, a dependency on colleagues for outreach assistance, and establishing points of contact (e.g., a local synagogue, local homes) in the various population centers (see Schnabel 2002, vol. 1, pp. 511–17).31 Even so, missiological perspectives are important for us to ponder since, as Schnabel rightly affirms, Paul the missionary cannot be easily divorced from Paul the theologian (Schnabel 2004, vol. 2, p. 1473). More pointedly, it is hard to separate Paul as an apostolic preacher of the gospel from his role as a missionary. His gospel and mission overlap. Some notable contributions that highlight this intersection come from John P. Dickson and Dean Flemming.

4.3.1. John Dickson

John Dickson attempts to demonstrate that Paul’s everyday converts were not expected to carry out evangelistic activities as did Paul, though they were expected to support missionary workers through various means. Missionary work may be understood as a “range of activities” for religious community members who desired “the conversion of outsiders”. These activities were expressions of mission-commitment that included such things as “ethical or verbal apologetic, financial assistance of missionaries and prayer for the conversion of humankind” (Dickson 2003, p. 10; cf. pp. 131–32, 151, 153–77, 309). Dickson engages with Paul’s gospel in relation to the apostle’s commission, the gospel as missionary speech, and the gospel as dogma and activity (confessional content and mission advancement as proclamation). Whether other scholars will be convinced that Paul’s congregations were not as directly active in missions as Dickson suggests will be a matter of being convinced by his interpretation of standard texts in this regard (e.g., Phil. 1:5, 27; 2:16; 1 Thes. 1:8; 2 Cor. 9:13; cf. Col. 4:6; Eph. 6:15) (Dickson 2003, pp. 94–122).

With other scholars, Dickson connects the Greek verb εὐαγγελίζω to the Hebrew root, בשׂר which gave rise to its early Christian use. Paul, similar to the Gospels, was influenced by the Isaianic herald tradition in Isa. 52:7 (cf. 40:9; 61:1)/Rom. 10:14–16, and he brings out its eschatological and “sending” significance, as well as the theme of authorization for those who proclaim the gospel. For Dickson, the language of εὐαγγέλιον itself may be derived from the Isaianic text of 40–55 not only given Paul’s explicit quote from Isa. 52:7 but also his routine use of Isaiah 40–55 in Romans. Paul interprets the Isaianic text as a “prophetic endorsement of the gospel-heralding of which he was part” (Dickson 2003, p. 166; cf. pp. 87–91, 159–65). The authorized commissioning of the heralds by Christ in Rom. 10:17 (“the word of Christ” interpreted as a subjective genitive) points back to the tradition of Jesus sending out his disciples to proclaim the gospel in Luke 9:15 and 10:5–8, Matt 10:8–11, and Mark 6:8–12. This tradition Paul knows well, as is evident in 1 Cor. 9:14.

Dickson justifies his reading of εὐαγγέλιον as “news”—the term refers to announcement rather than ongoing instruction. Paul uses it to denote his initial missionary proclamation rather than an entire range of “evangelistic and teaching ministry” activities for his congregations, and this is consistent with other ancient discourses (Dickson 2005, p. 230).32 Dickson stands against the view that Rom. 1:15 indicates that Paul wanted to gospelize the Romans who already believed. Dickson points to the context and aorists in Rom. 1:13, which he claims informs the aorist infinitive εὐαγγελίσασθαι in v. 15. Both verses suggest that Paul wanted to proclaim the gospel news to them in the past.33 If Paul still desired to evangelize them, this would stand in tension with his principle of proclaiming the gospel where Christ is not named. He does not want to build on another person’s foundation: Rom. 15:20–24 (Dickson 2005, pp. 224–28). Dickson suggests that with one million people in Rome, Paul would not infringe on building on another Christian’s foundation if he planned to evangelize those outside the church in Rome in Rom. 1:15 (Dickson 2005, pp. 228, n. 69, 229). This seems reasonable enough to resolve the tension between Rom. 1:15 and 15:20–24, but then I must wonder why Dickson wants to maintain a past tense in Rom. 1:15. This makes it appear as though Paul does not want to evangelize non-believers in Rome in the present.

Personally, I am convinced that Paul’s letter to the Romans is itself Paul’s gospel. In other words, Rom. 1:1–15 and 15:14–16:27 are the front and back frames of this letter, and its body, Rom. 1:16–15:13, is where Paul, at least in a preliminary way, makes good his intention to proclaim the gospel to his Roman recipients, as mentioned in Rom. 1:15.34 The immediate obligation of Paul to preach to various people groups in the present tense (v. 14), I believe, directly influences the aorist εὐαγγελίσασθαι in v. 15, which should be understood in a present or gnomic sense: “I am a debtor…to proclaim good news also to you [Paul’s letter recipients] who are in Rome” (Porter and Yoon 2024, p. 8). Hence, the verb in v. 15 refers to Paul’s current and continuing desire to “gospelize” the Romans.35 We should also compare “ὑμῖν τοῖς ἐν Ῥώμῃ” in Rom. 1:15 with “ὑμεῖς… τοῖς οὖσιν ἐν Ῥώμῃ” in Rom. 1:7 and notice an almost exact match. Rom 1:7 clearly refers to Paul’s Roman auditors in this letter rather than unbelievers in Rome. Hence, it would seem that Rom. 1:15 likewise refers to the same Roman auditors, or at very least it includes them if Paul has some sort of secondary motive to bring the gospel to unbelievers in Rome once he arrives there. If the body of this letter is Paul’s gospel, then once we reach Rom. 5, Paul is no longer discussing an initial gospel proclamation but follow-up instruction and then paraenesis up to Rom. 15:13, all of which he still considers to be part of his gospel. This is confirmed in Rom. 15:14–18. Paul’s priestly service of the gospel results in presenting the nations as a holy and acceptable offering before God, and this letter is part of his endeavor to do just that. Moreover, his gospel is not just about initial faith/trust but also obedience (Rom. 15:16; cf. 1:5, 16:26), and obedience requires follow-up teachings and exhortations. We see this also in other Pauline letters; for example, when Paul wants his congregations to walk worthy of the gospel and not be led astray from it (Phil. 1:27; cf. 1 Thess. 2:9–12; Gal. 1:6–9; 2 Cor. 11:2–4; Col. 1:26–29). These examples of gospel use strongly suggest that Paul’s good news can extend beyond the initial proclamation to further teaching and exhortation. Indeed it must do so, because sin and deception can undermine the faith of those who initially trust in Christ, the centerpiece of the gospel. If such forces have their way with these converts, Paul fears that they might become an unacceptable offering to God. This is not to deny, however, that the frequent, even usual way Paul uses his gospel language has to do with foundational proclamations, in keeping with Dickson’s observations in other ancient literature.36 What I deny is that Paul exclusively uses gospel terminology this way.

4.3.2. Dean Flemming

Likewise emphasizing mission is Dean Flemming who distinguishes between a narrow and broad sense of the word. In the narrow sense of gospel and church planting, mission involves initial activities and refers to a sent-out group of called individuals seeking to bring outsiders to faith in Jesus and place them in Christ-communities (Rom. 10:8–18; 1 Cor. 9:19–23; Gal. 1–2; Eph. 3:1–13). He prefers, however, a comprehensive sense of mission that includes the restoration of all nations and the entire cosmos as part of the divine purpose, the Missio Dei (Flemming 2013, pp. 163–71; Flemming 2015; Flemming 2023, pp. 703–14, esp. pp. 703–4). In this divine mission, Paul participates in a “gospel mission” not merely outwardly focusing on non-believers but also inwardly focusing on the transformation of Christ communities. Moreover, Paul’s mission is not about “dominant groups coercing less powerful people to accept their beliefs or cultures. Mission in Paul is about getting caught up in God’s liberating, reconciling purposes in the world” (Flemming 2023, p. 704). This includes Paul sharing not only the gospel message but his own life (1 Thess. 2:8). Such a gospel involves several activities:

(1)

It tells the story of the divine saving work in Christ (1 Cor. 1:24).

(2)

It is a divine transforming power that works in the world (Rom. 1:16).

(3)

It functions as a theopolitical announcement in contrast with the gospel about Caesar.

(4)

It is the truth to be upheld and defended (Gal. 1:6–7).

(5)

It is the norm for living (Phil. 1:27) (Flemming 2013, pp. 63–69).37

Paul is bound up with the gospel he proclaims and serves (Rom. 1:1, 15:16; Eph. 3:7; Col. 1:23), and this involves more than merely a set of propositions but “tells the story of God’s loving and redeeming mission in Christ” from God (Rom. 15:16) about Christ (Rom. 15:19). That story focuses, inter alia, on Christ’s death and resurrection, the promise of restoration, and it is linked to the Abrahamic promise of blessing the nations. It also is a transforming power that is not only to be believed but constitutes Christian conduct, saves, reconciles, and is universal (for both Jews and gentiles) (Flemming 2023, pp. 709–12). Paul’s missionary practices, then, are not only about winning people to Christ, but also raising up communities in Christ and nurturing those communities (1 Cor. 3:7–10; 9:22; Rom. 5:9–10; 1 Thess. 2:19). Those communities in turn are to embody the gospel as the new creation in the world, living out that message and narrating that gospel in missionary participation.

Flemming takes the opposite position that Dickson does when the latter argues that the gospel refers only to announcement of the news and not further instruction to congregations. Flemming argues that Paul’s gospel is to be understood comprehensively, and this includes his nurturing and strengthening the Christ communities long after the members have come to believe in the gospel. The apostle aimed “to form strong and strategic congregations” (Flemming 2013, p. 163; see also Bowers 1987, p. 198; O’Brien 1995, pp. 42–43). Flemming, I think, makes the better case. Part of Paul’s gospel, as many scholars recognize (e.g., Stuhlmacher, Käsemann, and Sanders), has to do with the Parousia and final judgment (1 Thess. 1:4–10; Rom. 2:6–16; cf. 1 Thess. 5:9; Acts 17:30–31). The goal of Paul’s gospel is salvation which, among other things, is to escape from God’s wrath (1 Thess. 1:9–10; Rom. 5:8–9), and this includes the prospect of being found blameless at final judgment (1 Thess. 3:13, 5:23; Phil. 2:15–16). Hence, when the gospel is first received, it still must be played out and embodied by those who receive it, and that takes place over an entire lifetime. The gospel message must thus be reaffirmed and its details expanded on through follow-up ministry and further teachings (Rom. 6:17; Phil. 1:27; Col. 1:21–28).

5. Paul and His Recent Gospel Interpreters

5.1. Eclectic, Traditional, and Post-New Perspectives

I start this section with the caveat that by no means am I intending to express that the perspectives we just covered are now passe. Although some of the scholars have passed away (e.g., Sanders, Dunn, and Martyn), the perspectives they influenced continue with other scholars, a number of which are still active in the field today. The only distinction between those viewpoints and the ones we address below are that the latter have found their impetus in recent years. They reflect the newest interpretations of Paul’s gospel.

5.1.1. Petr Porkorný

Petr Porkorný sets out for more clarification of the development of the term εὐαγγέλιον that has multiple meanings including the message proclaimed by Jesus (e.g., in Mark’s Gospel), the post-Easter proclamation (e.g., in Paul), and the literary Gospel genre (e.g., the four NT Gospels) (Porkorný 2013). The results of his study are, first, that Jesus used the Hebrew בּשׂר to speak about his kingdom, influenced by Isa. 61:1. Then, Paul used the noun εὐαγγέλιον as formula for the resurrection of Jesus. The life and teachings of Jesus “took a back seat because Paul did not build up his moral admonitions upon the model of Jesus’ teaching and life, but predominantly upon his cosmic role as the incarnate Son of God who descended on earth to save humankind” (Porkorný 2013, p. 195). This is not to say that Paul did not know Jesus’s sayings; he in fact uses them sometimes in his letters, even if seemingly reluctant to do so (e.g., 1 Cor. 4:11–13; 11:23–26). But, he does not appear to know, or at least does not refer to, the broad narratives about Jesus’s life nor his parables (Porkorný 2013, pp. 57–80).38 Paul uses εὐαγγέλιον with an understanding of Jewish apocalyptic resurrection attested in Jesus, and the culmination of the ages has yet to be fulfilled; the former guarantees fulfillment of the latter. He adopted the gospel term with this sense of meaning from early Christians after the Easter event, but through his own use of the term in his letters “it entered Christian literature and became the key term of Christian teaching and preaching” (Porkorný 2013, p. 195).

After this use, the author of Mark’s Gospel with his own use of εὐαγγέλιον seems to be indirectly influenced by Pauline theology. Nevertheless, he was familiar with Jesus traditions, partly from oral and partly from sayings collections (Q and other “small clusters”), and from liturgy (e.g., the Lord’s Prayer, Lord’s Supper, and Passion narratives). The problem of the gospel’s expansion in non-Jewish places, along with “new interpretations of Jesus traditions” plus the ambiguity related to the authority of such traditions beyond Jewish Scripture, prompted Mark to write an authoritative biographical book “from the Hellenistic point of view”. Mark used the Easter (resurrection) sense of εὐαγγέλιον “as the key term of which the overarching structure of his book was based”, relating Jesus’s pre-Easter life “to his attested new post-Easter function, in the way that εὐαγγέλιον is expressed in 1 Cor. 15:3b-5” (Porkorný 2013, p. 196). Originally, Mark’s book was read liturgically, but then a type of canonization of it along with early Gospels emerged during the period of 100–150 CE. Mark 1:1 (Ἀρχὴ τοῦ εὐαγγελίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ) was intended as the title of the book, and it later was called “Gospel”, and then “The Gospel according to…” with other emerging (canonical) Gospels (Matthew and Luke) that combined Markan and Q material with expanded narratives and resurrection accounts. And John “renarrated all the material in his own language and from his theological viewpoint” (Porkorný 2013, p. 198).

Porkorný’s careful study provides us with a reasonable way forward regarding the development of the term “gospel” in the earliest Christian discourse. When it comes to Paul, however, I have to wonder how comprehensible it would be to declare Jesus’s death and resurrection without Paul knowing or communicating the narrative traditions behind such declarations. Dunn brought up earlier that without such narratives, Paul’s gentile audience would not be able to make much sense of his gospel. A problem related to this is why Paul would present the earthly Jesus as a role model to be imitated (1 Cor. 11:1). As Dormeyer asserts, how could such exhortations have saliency for the Corinthians unless the life and teachings of Jesus were known to them beyond simply his death and resurrection? (Dormeyer 2015, pp. 123–25). Paul also appears to teach imitation models in all his congregations (1 Cor. 4:16–17), and we see other instances of this in, e.g., 1 Thess. 1:6, 2 Cor. 10:1, and Phil. 2:3–8.

While it remains plausible that Mark wanted to link the gospel proclamation of Jesus with “the Easter gospel”, it is not at all clear that Mark borrowed his terminology from Paul, let alone that his Gospel is Pauline.39 Paul’s own use of the term comes from pre-Pauline formulae, as Porkorný affirms. The missing element here seems to be for us to ask how these pre-Pauline followers of Christ used the term. A plausible answer would seem to be that they derived it from Jesus’s own use of בּשׂר, and perhaps scholars are making way too much of a distinction between the verb use of “good news” in Isaiah 61 and the noun use missing in the text. It does not seem to be far-fetched to suggest that Jesus was remembered by disciples to have sometimes used not just the verb but also the noun form of the good news. If so, then texts that use the noun, such as Mark 13:10 and 14:9 and their Matthean parallels—multiple attestations—might reflect Jesus’s own remembered use of the noun, though originally oral and in Aramaic. Paul, in 1 Thess. 4–5, echoes the “thief in the night” parable of Jesus and other aspects of Jesus’s end-time sayings related to the what we call today the Olivet Discourse (finally frozen in Mark 13; cf. Matt. 24; Luke 21). He then perhaps knew the gospel saying in Mark 13:10 and Matt. 24:14. Paul’s gospel terminology, then, may be influenced by Jesus remembered, whether from his knowledge of Jesus’ sayings or indirectly from those who were disciples of Jesus before him who received their own terminology from Jesus. In any case, Porkorný seems right to suggest that Paul provided the impetus in early Christ communities to use the noun in the “Easter” sense, whereas Jesus used it more in the kingdom sense. At the same time, it is not at all impossible that Jesus anticipated through his end-time discourse that his own death and resurrection would be included in the gospel’s future messaging, a point Paul would seem to take for granted having received “from the Lord” the Lord’s Supper tradition of Jesus’s impending death and what it would mean for his followers (1 Cor. 11:23–26).

5.1.2. Michael Gorman

An eclectic reading of Paul that combines missiological, pastoral, and theological disciplines is evident in Michael Gorman’s studies (Gorman 2015, esp. p. 10; also Gorman 2008, 2017, 2019). Although Gorman recognizes that Paul claims his gospel comes from God and not humans (Gal. 1:1, 11–12), he notices how the apostle cites or paraphrases various portions of hymns, poems, creeds, and confessions from early congregations to articulate his own gospel. It is from liturgical fragments that one can distill and collect the early gospel kerygma held in common by Paul and other early Christ-followers. These include promises via Scripture and the Prophets; Jesus’s first advent in fulfillment of these promises; his futuristic return related to salvation and divine wrath; his royal messianic status as God’s Son and David’s son; his lordship; his death by crucifixion; his resurrection; the necessity of human response in faith, confession, and service; and the effects of the Christ event on believers—“the outpouring of the Spirit, forgiveness of sins, liberation from sin and from the present evil age, justification, redemption, deliverance from the coming wrath” (Rom. 1:1–4, 3:24–25, 4:24–25,8:32, 10:9; 1 Cor. 12:3, 15:3–8; Gal. 1:4; 2:20, 4:4–5; Phil. 2:7–8; 1 Thess. 1:9–10; cf. Col. 1:15–20; Eph. 1:3–14; 1 Tim. 3:16; 2 Tim. 2:8, 11–13) (Gorman 2019, pp. 121–23).

Paul’s gospel is likewise “theopolitical” by announcing events dealing with divine intervention in history, which then makes such an event theological and political. Indeed, the basic vocabulary of the gospel draws from both Jewish and Greco-Roman worlds—whereas good news has a sense of God’s salvation in Jewish context, it refers to birth, reign, beneficence, and military victory in the Roman world. Likewise, terms such as “Lord”, “salvation”, “peace”, “kingdom”, “faith”, “justice”, “glory”, and “parousia” have similar dual meanings (Gorman 2017, pp. 130–33; 2001). Even so, for Gorman, the gospel is not really about a set of propositions, but “the account of the planned, executed, and soon-to-be-consummated benevolent invasion of God into the history of Israel, human history more generally, and the entire cosmos to set right the creation gone awry”, and it is also “the power of God unleashed in the world” that effects transformation for its receivers (Gorman 2008, pp. 44–45; 2019, p. 137).

Central to Gorman is that “Paul wanted the communities he addressed not merely to believe the gospel but to become the gospel, and in so doing to participate in the very life and mission of God” (Gorman 2015, p. 8, cf. p. 156). Paul presents himself as the embodiment of his own gospel by stressing that his good news has come by power in the Spirit, signs and wonders, and significantly, “word and deed”, which not only speaks the gospel but lives it out (Rom. 15:19). His congregations likewise were expected to embody the gospel. The Thessalonians, for example, are to wait for Christ and exemplify faith expressed in service for the living and life-giving God (1 Thess. 1:2–9; cf. 2:13–16, 3:1–10). They embody and share this gospel; they become faithful witnesses in spite of persecution, exemplifying their gospel “not merely in their tight-knit community, but in their world: among their friends, relatives, associates, and so on—perhaps including their masters or patrons (on the assumption that most of the believers were not among the elite)” (Gorman 2015, p. 42, cf. p. 27; Gorman 2019, p. 24).

For Gorman, “becoming” suggests a process, which is precisely what participating in Christ is—“transformation into the image of God in Christ (or theosis)” (Gorman 2015, p. 10). Among Gorman’s various points related to participation in Christ, he stresses the importance of dying and rising with Christ (Rom. 6 and Gal. 2) in which entering the Messiah comes by faith and baptism, and justification becomes a participatory event “meaning that justification is resurrection to new life by means of co-crucifixion with Christ” (Gorman 2019, p. 17). Here, we find a prime example of how the gospel’s kerygma—Christ’s death and resurrection—now begins to be embodied by the gospel’s respondents. Regarding becoming the gospel in reference to mission, Gorman adds that Christ participants are to embody “the missional practices of love, peace-making, reconciliation, restorative justice, forgiveness, nonviolence, and so on that correspond to what God has done in the Messiah” (Gorman 2019, p. 25, cf. p. 45). God was in Christ, and we are in Christ, and thus “every summons to virtue, every commandment, every exhortation is a call to practice ‘the law of Christ’ (Gal. 6:2; cf. 1 Cor. 9:12), the narrative pattern of the crucified Messiah” (Gorman 2019, p. 26).

The number of kerygmatic fragments Gorman enlists suggests a maximalist approach to this subject in relation to the gospel. A complexity here is our discernment of which statements are actually pre-Pauline and which are Paul’s own invention. Gorman’s emphasis on becoming the gospel complements Flemming’s perspective in support of the gospel as something that is progressive and not simply tied in with the initial gospel proclamation. In Gorman’s case, an accent is placed on the gospel as a saving and progressive event, particularly in related to participation in Christ. Gorman’s approach likewise draws from a number of theological and confessional perspectives, as he makes clear from his many footnotes, not the least of which is the doctrine of theosis from the Eastern Orthodox Church. To this tradition we now turn.

5.1.3. Bradley Nassif

Bradley Nassif exemplifies the Eastern Orthodox tradition in reference to the gospel (Nassif 2021, pp. 16–25; 2004, pp. 27–87). For him, all conversation regarding the gospel has its beginning with the incarnation of Christ and trinitarian relationships in accord with the Nicene and Chalcedonian creeds. Nassif clarifies that, even so, “The story of the gospel cannot be reduced to emphasizing a few propositions about the substitutionary work of Christ on the cross, justification by faith and the need to repent and believe, crucial as those things are. Rather, the gospel involves the whole plan of salvation history (oikonomia)”, which has to do with divine providence that governs human history “towards the Incarnation of the Word who will save fallen humanity and renew the entire physical cosmos” (Nassif 2021, p. 22, cf. p. 16). The gospel is thus rooted in the history of fallen humanity, old and new covenant relationships with Israel as its conduit to reveal it to the nations, and its climax is in the new creation, fulfilled with the Kingdom of God of Jesus’s ministry through to its consummation in the coming era. “Jesus is the one through whom God has formed a new covenant people through his life, death, resurrection, ascension and sending of the Spirit at Pentecost. In the present age, that new covenant is established in the Eucharist…Here the Church’s liturgical theology is revealed as kingdom theology; and kingdom theology is gospel theology” (Nassif 2021, pp. 16–17).40

The story of salvation history thus constitutes Paul’s gospel (Gal. 4:4; 1 Cor. 15:1–8). The gospel is needed because the trinitarian God created humans in God’s image. The original couple were to grow eternally in the likeness of God, and “this is known as ‘glorification’, ‘deification’ or theosis”, but this union with God was broken on account of sin (Rom 5:12; cf. Gen. 3). The incarnation of Christ, and what it accomplished, marked a saving reunion: “To be united to Christ means that we are joined to the incarnate Person of Christ himself, and by this union we participate in the very life and love of the Trinity. Paul identifies this mystery as ‘Christ in you, the hope of glory’ (Col. 1.27). The mystery of Christ’s union with his Church lies at the core of the good news that Paul preached and was willing to suffer and die for” (cf. Col. 4:3; Eph. 6:19–20) (Nassif 2021, pp. 17–18). The gospel is distinguished by its content as well as gifts (benefits) and demands. The benefits of Christ’s death and resurrection include “union with God, justification, redemption, reconciliation, adoption, sanctification, a new humanity, the fruit of the Spirit, a new creation and more”; at the same time, there are demands required by the cross: “radical discipleship, most notably recorded in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt. 5–7). The Christian life is a life of daily dying to sin and increasing in newness of life (Rom. 6.1–11; 12.12)” (Nassif 2021, p. 21, cf. p. 16).41

Nassif’s gospel perspective finds its strength in unifying the biblical message that stories God’s image in humanity, humanity’s fall, and the restoration of that image in humanity and new creation. These are very much Pauline themes, even though, ironically, Nassif’s study could have benefitted from a more intensive scriptural focus on Paul’s gospel.42 The Eastern Orthodox tradition from which he draws features this panoramic scope, and its gospel emphasizes not only the death and resurrection of Jesus but also his incarnation. In reference to the gospel, this tradition has been influencing some scholars in Protestant traditions beyond Gorman. For example, Scot McKnight affirms that Orthodox scholars such as Nassif contributed to his own view that sees Christology (or “Christ devotion”) as the foremost content of the gospel, and this is distinct from the gospel’s gifts (benefits and blessings). For McKnight, “The gospel is announcement or proclamation of Jesus as the long-awaited Messiah of Israel’s hope who, through his life, death, burial, resurrection, and ascension, conquers sin and death—personal, systemic—in order to unleash the redemption of God, that is, the kingdom of God, for the transformation of humans and systems. In even a shorter tweet, the gospel is the story about Jesus. In one word, Jesus” (McKnight forthcoming, 2015).43 Also, David deSilva, who stresses transformation as central to Paul’s gospel, writes that the gospel must solve two essential problems if indeed it is to be good news: (1) the reconciliation of alienated creatures with their Creator; and (2) the restoration of God’s image that has been lost in relation to these creatures. According to deSilva, John Wesley “combined both the Western Christian ‘juridical emphasis on guilt and absolution’ and the Eastern Orthodox ‘therapeutic concern for healing our sin-diseased nature’ in one unified view of God’s saving work” (deSilva forthcoming, 2014).44

5.1.4. Brand Pitre, Michael P. Barber, and John A. Kincaid

Relevant to Paul’s gospel is the collaborative work of Brant Pitre, Michael P. Barber, and John A. Kincaid, which aims to make a Roman Catholic contribution in view of recent scholarly developments in the context of the ecumenical movement and new perspective on Paul (Pitre et al. 2019, pp. 1–10; Pitre 2020). In this study, Paul is foremost self-identified as a Jew, that is, a new covenant Jew based on his ministerial role in 2 Cor. 3:6 and alluding to Jer. 31:31–34. Although he was shaped by Jewish Scripture, he came to a new understanding of it on account of his revelation of Jesus. Central to his gospel is that Jesus is Messiah, son of David, Son of God, and the risen Lord of all things. The authors conclude that Paul’s gospel is best identified as one of divine sonship, and it invites “both Jews and gentiles to become the sons and daughters of God in Christ” (Pitre et al. 2019, p. 253). Such a transformation begins with baptism and reaches full expression in the end time when those who are in Christ are judged and justified by works (Rom. 2:6; 2 Cor. 5:10) (Pitre 2020, pp. 46–53). It is through the divine Son that Jews and gentiles are graced to be adopted into one body of Christ and transformed by the divine life in union with him. This is more than just the imitation of Christ; it is participation in his sonship so that the summon bonum of Irenaeus becomes reality: “Christ became as we are so we might become as he is” (Irenaeus, Haer. 5 Pr. 1) (Pitre et al. 2019, p. 210).

Here, we find traditional Catholic beliefs combined with Sanders’, and the new perspective emphases such as Paul’s Jewishness and participation in Christ. Such features do appear to work towards ecumenism and invite more conversations between Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christians.

5.1.5. Paula Fredriksen

Paula Fredriksen presents the gospel from a Paul-within-Judaism perspective. She writes that three interrelated ideas help form the framework for interpreting Paul’s gospel, his “mission and message”: (1) In the initial stage of the movement, gentile Christ-followers became the “accidental consequence of the gospel’s postcrucifixion spread out to mixed pagan-Jewish cities”, first in Judean towns like Joppa and Caesarea, and then the Diaspora. (2) The first apostles drew on inclusive biblical and apocalyptic prophecies to form a “gentile policy” in which pagan adherents were “eschatological gentiles”. These pagans were neither circumcised converts nor god-fearers who simply added the Jewish god to their others gods, but those “who had renounced their own gods and made an exclusive commitment to Israel’s god”. (3) Synagogue officials and Paul himself (prior to his Christophany) resorted the apostles and followers to “disciplinary lashing…This was because the gospel, by involving ex-pagan pagans on these ‘eschatological’ terms, disrupted the relations between heaven and earth, thereby alienating both local gods and their humans, and so unsettling the synagogues’ place within their cities” (Fredriksen 2017, pp. 146–47, cf. pp. 80–93, 242, n. 35).45 Then, Paul’s Damascus Christophany took place (Gal. 1:13–14, 17; 1 Cor. 15:8), a vision that redirected him to become a preacher of God’s son to other nations (Gal. 1:16; Rom. 1:6, 16:26). This vision also confirmed him with the “core content of the gospel message” that he reiterates in 1 Cor. 15 regarding the Christ’s resurrection, return, and imminent kingdom (Fredriksen 2017, p. 147), though this is not to say that Paul did not also receive the core content of his gospel from Jewish apostles, as can be seen in 1 Cor. 15:3–5.46

For Fredriksen, Paul continued to observe Jewish ancestral practices along with other Jewish Jesus-followers—his gospel was not “law-free”. As an ancient monotheist, he believed that other gods existed, though he was antagonistic towards them. He maintained allegiance instead to the god of Israel, and as an apocalyptic thinker, he anticipated a soon coming day when these gods would be defeated (Phil. 2:10; Cor. 15:24–27). Paul also embraced the Jewish traditions that anticipated the nations being reassembled with Israel at the dawning of the divine kingdom; they would “turn” to Israel’s god and away from their idols (Tob. 14:6; LXX Isa. 45:22). This turn to the god of Israel, however, is not the same thing as “converting to Judaism.” Paul’s “pagans are not to ‘become’ Jews. But they are to live as if they were eschatological pagans—which, by his lights, they are. During the brief wrinkle in time between the resurrection and the Parousia, Paul’s pagans are to worship only Paul’s god, the god of Israel, empowered to do so by that god’s risen son” (Fredriksen 2010, p. 242). Paul’s gospel message is thus viewed in light of 1 Thess. 1:9–10, in which pagans are to turn from their idols to the Jewish god and await god’s son from heaven who delivers from the coming wrath. Moreover, by being “in Christ”, these pagans are protected from a two-fold wrath—from “that of their own gods, infuriated by the lack of cult; and that of the god of Israel, which ‘is coming’ (v. 10; cf. Gal. 4:8–9).” Although Israel and the nations are to worship together, both in Paul and Jewish apocalyptic before him, “the nations join with Israel, but they do not join Israel” (Fredriksen 2010, pp. 242–43). They have separate identities. Through adoption via Abraham and the Spirit (Gal. 3–4), “redeemed Israel and the pagans-in-Christ together share the same heavenly father κατά πνεύμα, but κατά σάρκα they remain distinct” (Fredriksen 2010, p. 244).

Fredriksen launches from the trajectory of Sanders a viewpoint that re-evaluates ancient Judaism in a favorable light. From the Paul-within-Judaism perspective, Paul never left his former religious beliefs and practices; his criticisms of other Torah-followers have to do with their wanting to get his ex-pagan pagans to be circumcised when they are not Jews and do not need to become Jews. Tensions remain, however, as to, e.g., how Paul could be in solidarity with his gentile converts’ freedom from the law of circumcision (Gal. 2:3–4), how he could claim that he died to the Torah (Gal. 2:19–21), or how he could speak as though from the vantage point of someone who is free from the Torah’s regulations (1 Cor. 9:19–22). Nonetheless, Fredriksen maintains a distinction between Israel and nations that I find appealing. This distinction for me suggests that the “Israel of God” in Gal. 6:16 does not include gentiles, nor does “all Israel shall be saved” in Rom. 11:26. Paul’s allegedly ancient monotheism, however, I find questionable. Gal. 4:8 seems to preclude other gods by nature. Influenced by Deutero-Isaiah, whom the apostle often quotes, Paul would seem to believe that there are no other gods beside the Jewish God, period (Isa. 43:10–12; 44:6; 45:5–6, 18, 22; 46:9; 47:8, 10). Moreover, Paul, taking the side of the strong/knowing Corinthian members in accepting that there is only one God and one Lord Jesus in 1 Cor. 8:1–13, seems to suggest that it is only the weak members who believe in and are thus susceptible to falling back into worshipping the former deities they once served. Even so, Paul surely believes that higher powers and spirits, such as angels and demons, do exist. Also, his vocabulary seems to be more flexible than I would want it to be on at least one occasion; in 2 Cor. 4:4, he appears to call Satan the “god of this age.” He could be using “god” in a figurative sense, though, similar to Phil. 3:19 (“whose god is the belly”).

5.1.6. John M. G. Barclay

John Barclay prefers to use the term “good news” for εὐαγγέλιον so as to preserve its force in Greek as “the announcement of an event.” He asserts that Paul shapes the prescript of Gal. 1:1–5 “into an expression of the dynamic that characterizes his ‘good news’” (Barclay 2015, p. 351). This text provides evidence of “early Christian formulae” including God raising Jesus from the dead, Jesus giving himself for our sins, “grace and peace”, and “to whom be glory forever and ever.” As well, since Paul considers himself an apostle of this good news that is sourced from Jesus and God rather than human agency, divine initiative is being featured here (Gal. 1:1, 7, 11–12, 16). This is significant and central to the letter of Galatians’ theology, for it “signals a relation of misfit, even contradiction, between the ‘good news’ and the typical structures of human thought and behavior”. The origin of Paul’s gospel “lies outside the human sphere: it was not received from human authority, not delivered by human instruction…” (Barclay 2015, pp. 355–56). For Barclay, Paul’s good news “announces a gift given without regard to previous criteria of worth”, and so “every cultural tradition (Jewish and non-Jewish) is subject to its supreme criterion of value, and every practice made relative to the purposes of Christ” (Barclay 2020, p. 147; 2017, pp. 354–72).

Barclay suggests regarding Romans that whereas Galatians centers on the “good news of Christ” (Gal. 1:7), Romans is concerned about the “good news of God” (Rom. 1:1; 15:16)—though no less about Christ (Rom. 1:9, 15:19)—as it presents its theocentric focus (Barclay 2015, p. 451). A pattern that repeats itself here is that God is the source of the action behind the good news (Rom. 1:16–17; 3:3, 21, 26; 15:8), and God acts through (διά) Christ, whether in salvation or in judgment (3:22, 24; 5:1, 17, 21; 7:25; cf. 2:16), “justification takes place by God’s grace ‘through the redemption in Christ Jesus’ (3:24)”. Elsewhere the divine gift Paul speaks of is “in” (the grace of) Christ (Rom. 5:15; 6:23; 8:39) (Barclay 2015, pp. 451–52). Likewise, in Romans, the good news provides a framework for the letter (Rom. 1:1–7; 15:7–13). It is rooted in Scripture derived from Israel’s story, especially prophetic promises (1:2; 15:8), and it includes gentiles on equal par with Israel (1:5; 15:9–12). Moreover, the good new concerns God’s messianic Son, David’s seed, involving power, Spirit, and the event of resurrection as a “leitmotiv” in the letter (Rom. 1:3–4) (Barclay 2015, pp. 459–60).

Regarding power released in the good news, this is linked to the revelation of divine righteousness that prompts faith. God’s power brings life from death and grafts or re-grafts “into the root of mercy” as it disregards differences between Jew and Greek while it yet also respects the “Jew first” (Rom. 1:16–17, 20; 4:17, 21; 11:23). The Spirit is important in this letter in relation to the gift in the heart and its circumcision mediating new life and “grounding the identity, and forming the obeience, of the children of God” (Rom. 2:29; 5:5; 7:6; 8:1–39; 15:13, 19). Finally, Jesus’s resurrection marks the “explosive moment” the power of the Spirit was released producing life from death “on which the believers’ faith is pinned” and from which “their identity is formed”. Together this trio of gospel power, Spirit, and resurrection “constitutes the mode by which the Christ-gift takes transformative effect in the human sphere” (Barclay 2015, p. 461).

This perception of the good news as divinely initiated in Galatians and theocentric in Romans is important for Barclay because he wants to stress in his work the perfection of grace as an incongruous gift. God bestowed the Christ-gift on humanity in an unconditioned way without regard to the worthiness of the recipients. Paul’s proclamation for Barclay “elicits faith” based on Rom. 10:8 and 16–17 “because it evokes the recognition that God has taken the definitive, unconditional initiative in Christ…the good news involves the recognition that the only source of value is the unconditioned gift of Christ” (Barclay 2015, p. 543). However, due to the limitation of Pauline letters he studies in detail, he does not address the gospel that Paul himself received from other humans in 1 Cor. 15:1–5 and how this can be reconciled with the revelatory gospel initiated by God that he wants to emphasize.47 Even so, his deft handling of the texts that he does address from Galatians and Romans dovetails nicely with his thesis of grace as a gift.

5.2. Recent Monographs

The last category we will address are the most recent authors whose studies and monographs concentrate on Paul’s gospel.

5.2.1. Joshua D. Garroway

Joshua Garroway argues that among Jesus’ believers, Paul is the one who coined the noun “gospel” (εὐαγγέλιον) in 43 CE somewhere in Asia Minor, years after his Damascus road experience (Garroway 2018, esp. pp. 1–15). Prior to that time, the gospel verb may have been used by Christ’s followers, but not the noun. Paul received a vision from the Lord at that time informing him that believing gentiles did not need to observe Mosaic law and circumcision.48 Paul, as a follower of Jesus, had previously proclaimed a message about circumcision to gentiles, which was common in the early Jewish Jesus movement. This earlier teaching about circumcision is what he refers to in Gal. 5:11: “And I, brothers and sisters, if I am still proclaiming circumcision, why I am still being persecuted? Then the stumbling block of the cross has been abolished”. After his Asian vision, Paul now promoted uncircumcision, and he first introduced this gospel when preaching in Philippi, as seen in Phil. 4:15 (Garroway 2018, p. 9).49 Here, Paul recollects to the Philippians (in the early 50’s CE according to Garroway) their relationship with his ministry “in the beginning of the gospel; that is, when he first started preaching his circumcision-free gospel for gentiles. This reading helps explain why Paul speaks of the gospel as his personal possession—as “my gospel” and the “gospel I preach” (Rom. 2:16; Gal. 1:11). His legacy then continued with Mark’s use of the term adopted from Paul, and from there to the other Gospels and early Christian sources.

For Garroway, Paul’s revelation in Gal. 1:11–12 refers to the circumcision-free gospel, not the Damascus road experience but the vision prior to his mission to Philippi. Here, the gospel is identified by the noun εὐαγγέλιον. This revelation was different from his earlier initial call to preach to the gentiles in Gal. 1:15–16, which does not use the noun but the verb (εὐαγγελίζω) (Garroway 2018, pp. 52–54). Paul’s visit with Cephas in Gal. 1:17–19 has no word about Paul’s circumcision-free gospel; at that time, Paul did not proclaim such a gospel. Such concerns take place many years after Paul’s encounter with Jesus, as his second visit to Jerusalem in Gal. 2:1–10 evinces. “The delayed emergence makes sense if Paul was not yet preaching a circumcision-free gospel when he first visited James and Cephas—that is, if Paul’s opposition to circumcision emerged sometime between his first and second visits to Jerusalem” (Garroway 2016, p. 232).

This novel solution makes sense of Paul’s first meeting with these apostles in Jerusalem three years after his Damascus road experience (Gal. 1:17–19). If Paul were already proclaiming a circumcision-free gospel at that time, we might expect him to say something about it here of all places, but he does not do so. Likewise, Garroway’s reading of Gal. 5:11 makes sense if this verse is a response to the accusation of Paul’s rivals in Galatia, and interestingly enough, Paul does not deny in this verse that he once preached circumcision. If in this verse he were merely referring to his pre-Damascus days as a Pharisee (as certain scholars suggest), why would his opponents bother to make such a useless accusation? Of course he preached circumcision at that time—he did not know Jesus and was not given his gospel revelation yet! There are other interpretations of Gal. 5:11 that are possible, but Garroway’s reading is among the more plausible ones.50 There is simply no clear evidence anywhere in the Pauline corpus that Paul automatically changed his view regarding gentile circumcision during his Damascus road experience. Moreover, if Acts is allowed to participate in this discussion, this makes the view of Paul’s alleged automatic change even less likely—Paul’s Damascus road experience (Acts 9) seems to take place before Peter witnesses to Cornelius, the first uncircumcised gentile believer in Jesus (Acts 10–11). In addition, similar to Gal. 1:17–19, Acts confirms that Paul met with apostles in Jerusalem after staying in Damasus, but this narrative, too, mentions nothing about Paul proclaiming gentile circumcision at that time (Acts 9:26–30) even though the narrative is well aware of this gentile problem (Acts 10–11, 15).

Although I agree with Garroway that Paul’s circumcision-free gospel was not something revealed to him during his Damascus road experience, I disagree with him that such a revelation about Paul’s gospel took place right before the apostle travelled to Philippi, and his ministry there was the beginning of his circumcision-free gospel. For me, there are too many red flags against this reading. First, Phil. 4:15 is best explained by Phil. 1:5, which speaks about the Philippians’ fellowship related to “the gospel [εὐαγγέλιον] from the first day until now”. In both verses, this seems to refer to the first time the Philippians heard and received the gospel rather than the first time Paul ever proclaimed his circumcision-free gospel to a group of people. It is also doubtful that, without any cues, the Philippians would readily recognize that Paul’s use of the noun εὐαγγέλιον (instead of the verb εὐαγγελίζω) would register to them as Paul referring to the beginning of his own specialized gospel.51 A confirmation of this reading is given by Fee who points out the same use in 1 Clement 47.1 that addresses the Corinthians some 45 years after they first received the gospel from Paul: “what did he [Paul] first write to you in the beginning of the gospel?” (Fee 1995, p. 440, n. 12).

Second, if Gal. 1:11–12 refers to a different revelation than Gal. 1:15–16, I venture to say that the Galatian auditors would not be primed to discern this; it could hardly be on the basis of a clear and consistent distinction they would make simply and automatically between the noun and verb use of the gospel. Far more intuitive is that they would understand Paul to be communicating the same revelatory experience in both texts, and that experience is contextually related to Damascus. Third, Peter’s message was already considered εὐαγγέλιον at the Jerusalem meeting in Gal. 2:1–10 (esp. Gal. 2:7, also confirmed in Acts 15:7). This noun form of the gospel already seemed to be attributed to both the ministries of Peter and Paul by the time it was officially recognized as such at this meeting. This suggests that even prior to this meeting in c. 49 CE, both of them were proclaiming the εὐαγγέλιον.52 This identification for their ministries must have originated, then, quite some time before the early 50s when Paul first visited Philippi. There is no good reason for me to assume that Paul visited Philippi prior to the Jerusalem meeting of Gal 2:1-10, reflected in Acts 15. This meeting seems to be remembered as taking place before his first visit to Philippi in Acts 16. Fourth, as I already explained earlier in this study, both Rom. 1:1–4 and 1 Cor. 15:1–5 contain very old pre-Pauline creedlets, both of which Paul identifies as εὐαγγέλιον. This tends to support the term’s employment among Jesus Messiah-followers many years prior to the Jerusalem meeting.53

So, when did Paul begin his circumcision-free gospel message? My suspicion is that the major incentive for it happened during his vision at the temple in Jerusalem in Acts 22:17–21, a vision I accept as an actual remembered event that took place the first time Paul visited Jerusalem after his Damascus road experience (cp. Gal. 1:15–24; Acts 9:26–31). First of all, this vision not only confirmed but also particularized his calling and being sent out to gentile nations. Prior to this time, it seems that he focused much of his energy on bringing the gospel to his own people even though the Lord appears to have originally called him to reach both Jews and gentiles during his Damascus experience (Acts 9:15; 21:15; 26:17, 20). Second, this vision in Jerusalem is also probably why, when recollecting his gospel travels to the nations many years later, he starts with Jerusalem rather than Damascus or Arabia in Rom. 15:19. Third, it is almost inconceivable that Paul (and Acts) would not mention any discussion between the Jerusalem apostles and Paul regarding his circumcision-free gospel when they first met him, if indeed he had been proclaiming such a message (Gal. 1:16–20; Acts 9:26–30). It is not mentioned during that visit because it was not yet Paul’s message. The apostles first discuss his circumcision-free gospel years later at the so-called Jerusalem “council” meeting when he and Barnabas were already ministers in Antioch (Gal. 2:1–10; Acts 15:1–20). Somewhere between the Jerusalem vision and the end of his stay in Syria and Cilicia, and surely already when ministering in Antioch, Paul altered his gospel message to include uncircumcised gentiles as equal covenant participants in Christ along with Jewish believers.

5.2.2. Graham H. Twelftree

Although Graham Twelftree’s recent work does not intend to place “gospel” at the center of Paul’s theology, the apostle’s frequent use of the term along with his using it to “describe his work and in relation to his self-identity”, warrants a re-examination of what the gospel is according to Paul. Twelftree’s study, among other things, wants to distill what the noun and verb form of the word meant in Paul’s day, how Paul received the term, how Jewish Scripture played into his perception of it, and whether it identifies his proclaimed, empowered, or embodied message, or something else. It turns out that power and miraculous deeds in the Spirit are to be added to the gospel, and Twelftree’s study, among other things, aims to show that the term takes on a multi-faceted meaning (Twelftree 2019, pp. 3–4, 178).54

Paul only once cites Scripture with “gospel” in it (in the verb form: Rom. 10:15/Isa. 52:7), and only on occasion does he use Scripture to support his understanding of it (Rom. 1:1–2, 16–17, 11:25–28, 15:20–21; 1 Cor. 9:16; 2 Cor 10:16) (Twelftree 2019, pp. 56–58, 76–77, 181–82). Most of the time, his gospel is not shaped by Scripture; rather, Scripture is made to conform to his already established gospel understanding. Twelftree thus concludes that Paul’s use of the noun εὐαγγέλιον is not derived from the LXX or Scripture. At the same time, Twelftree does not believe that Paul introduced εὐαγγέλιον into Christian vocabulary, despite its importance to Paul. Available to him would be the circulation of the gospel wording one finds in Q (Matt. 11:5/Luke 7:22), and the noun form one finds attributed to Peter at the Jerusalem “council” in Acts 15:7 (cf. Gal. 2:7, 9), plus other traditions passed on to Paul (1 Cor. 15:3–5; Rom. 1:3–4; 1 Thess. 1:9–10). Moreover, when writing about his gospel in 1 Cor. 9:14, Paul echoes the Q tradition from Luke 10:7 (Matt. 10:10) that “the worker is worthy of reward.” This mission charge shows not only that Paul is familiar with Jesus tradition passed on to him by others but he also saw himself as performing the same type of work Jesus and his original followers did. Both he and they replicate Christ’s own gospel ministry, not just in words but in deeds, but even in performing healings and miracles along with preaching (Twelftree 2019, esp. pp. 38–48). All of this suggests that Paul did not invent the gospel’s use in the Christ-community, whether noun or verb, but it was given to him by earlier Christ-followers, likely bilingual believers who brought over the Aramaic noun for “good news” (בשורתא) to the Greek “good news” (εὐαγγέλιον).55 His revelation in Gal. 1:12, 16 also contributed to this understanding, since that “experience confirmed that the revelation (of Jesus Christ, God’s Son) was both the gospel for him and also, notably, his call to propagate the gospel”, which encouraged him to affirm it as “my gospel” (Twelftree 2019, pp. 183–84; cf. pp. 75–77).

The gospel of the emperor would be proverbially in the air and unavoidable as part of Paul’s gospel background. Evidence from inscriptions in Priene, Apameia, Dorylaion, Eumeneia, and Maeonia suggest that this good news about the emperor was promulgated to various cities. The good news connection with the emperor provides “at least part of the background to Paul’s use of the term and the way it would have been read. That reading would have brought with it an association with a savior figure filled with divine power for the benefit of people, putting everything in peaceful order” (Twelftree 2019, p. 35). With Jesus as Lord, Paul seemed to have made himself open to an accusation of maiestas minuta, a type of treason that involved “a lessening of the dignity or high estate or authority of the people or of those to whom the people have given authority” (Cicero, Inv. 2.17.53) (Twelftree 2019, p. 35, n. 99). For Paul’s auditors, the εὐαγγέλιον of Jesus as Lord would then be seen in contradistinction with the good news of Caesar. Twelftree’s bottom line seems to be that Paul’s gospel is polyvalent, though it is a gospel that emphasizes not so much the message as the person of Christ (Phil. 1:12–26), and it is seen as the replication of Jesus’s ministry in terms of miracles and healing, not just proclamation. It is the gospel both in words and deeds. It is thus a gospel that is miraculous, transformative, lived out, and embodied (Twelftree 2019, pp. 188–94, 200).

I find Twelftree’s multifaceted approach to Paul’s gospel attractive, including the often-neglected aspect of the gospel as power, healing, and miracles. Sometimes, however, Twelftree’s emphasis on miracles seems to be at the expense of proclamation when he makes statements such as, “Simply put, Paul’s gospel is not his message” (Twelftree 2019, p. 202). Paul’s gospel remains foremost in my view the message he verbally communicates, though perhaps power and proclamation should not be postured against one another. I also think that Scripture plays a more influential role in Paul’s gospel than Twelftree seems to permit. The Scriptures Paul uses to support his gospel sometimes appear in very important texts of Paul’s letters. For example, Rom. 1:16–17 with its reference to Hab. 2:4 is the virtual thesis of his letter to the Romans. The body of this letter is itself a gospel, and it happens to contain the most Scripture references by far than any of Paul’s letters. Some other important Scripture mentions in Paul’s gospel texts include, e.g., 1 Cor. 15:1–4 (the heart of his gospel creed), Abrahamic references in Gal. 3 that Paul understands as a pre-gospel, and the small catena of Scriptures that immediately follow this in Gal. 3:10–13. Incidentally, Hab. 2:4 is quoted here too, and seems to be echoed again in Gal. 2:16, the thesis of the letter that pertains to the “truth of gospel” Paul mentions in Gal. 2:5, 14. Moreover, the concept of gospel should not be limited to εὐαγγελ- words. Sometimes, Paul uses other terms as stand-ins for his gospel, such as ῥῆμα and ἀκοή that appear in Rom. 10:8 and 10:16, which are drawn from Deut. 30:14 and Isa. 53:1, respectively. As well, there are many other Scriptures that seem important for Paul’s gospel once we go beyond quotations of Scripture to discuss allusions, echoes, and metalepsis. For instance, Paul quotes LXX Joel 3:5[2:28] in Rom. 10:13, and almost surely does so in this context (which is about his gospel) because he notices εὐαγγελιζόμενοι elsewhere in the same verse from Joel.

5.2.3. Matthew W. Bates

Matthew Bates understands Paul’s gospel as “the announcement that Jesus the Son was sent by God (the Father) to become the victorious king. When the king was enthroned, the Spirit was sent to bring benefits and to facilitate the gospel’s primary purpose: allegiant obedience to Jesus as the Christ among all the nations” (Bates 2023, p. 381; cf. Bates 2017, 2019, 2021). Bates suggests the gospel is described in an expanded form in a handful of passages (Rom. 1:1–5, 15:15–21, 16:24–26; 1 Cor. 15:3–5; Gal. 3:8; 2 Tim. 2:8), and there are also indications of a gospel message pointing back to the historical Jesus (e.g., Mark 1:14–15; Luke 4:16–21, 4:43), thus predating Paul and his revelation in Gal. 1:11–12. Referring to sources such as the Priene inscription, the gospel of N. T. Wright and Michael Gorman’s theopolitical nuance, Bates emphasizes a royal gospel in which “God’s king is now ruling: the Christ is Jesus” (Bates 2023, p. 382). Whereas contemporary concerns about the gospel focus on the salvific–historical content (e.g., covenant) or apocalyptic events (e.g., new creation), Bates understands the noun εὐαγγέλιον in a comparable way with the English word “proclamation”, which can center on three distinct aspects: “the content proclaimed (the message), the activity (the event of the speech-act), or the purposes or results” (Bates 2023, p. 383). The gospel as a proclamation can intend both content and activity, and it also has distinctive purposes.

Regarding the gospel content, this is central to Paul, as is evident in texts like Romans 1:1–4, which has to do with the son’s incarnation and enthronement. It assumes a divine providential arrangement in human and world affairs, and divine promises are made in advance through Scripture (Rom. 1:2, cf. Gen. 12:1–3; 2 Sam. 7:12–16) (Bates 2017, pp. 30–35; 2023, pp. 383–86). The gospel pertains to God’s Son who “came into being” (Rom. 1:3; cf. Gal. 4:4; 2 Tim. 2:8 Ign. Eph. 18.2; Irenaeus Haer. 3.16.3) and was “appointed Son-of-God-in-Power”, a new station or office since he was already “son” (Rom. 1:1) but now “Son-of-God-in-Power”. The Christological movement here is from pre-existence to incarnation to “glorified ruler” (Phil. 2:6–11; Rom. 8:3, 34). Other gospel texts present him, for example, as a raised king and crucified–risen king (2 Tim. 2:8; 1 Cor. 15:3–5), a blessing to the nations (Gal. 3:8), and so forth. Altogether for Bates, at least ten elements stand out regarding the content of the gospel that affirms Christ as king (Bates 2021, p. 34; 2023, p. 386; 2019, pp. 86–87; 2017, esp. pp. 72–74):

• Pre-existed as the Son of God (God the Son);
• Sent by the Father;
• Incarnated and fulfilled God’s promises as a son of David;
• Died for humans’ sins according to Scripture;
• Buried;
• On the third day, raised according to Scripture;
• Seen by many witnesses;
• Enthroned at God’s right hand as ruling Messiah and Lord;
• Christ sent the Holy Spirit to effect his rule in relation to his people;
• He will come again to judge and rule.

Bates juxtaposes similarities with the Apostle’s Creed and these gospel points, claiming that the creed is more than beliefs; it is “a concise presentation of the allegiance-demanding gospel” (Bates 2017, p. 211).

Regarding the gospel as an event or activity, Bates includes Rom. 1:16–17 that shows how the gospel’s content in Rom. 1:2–4 is able to save. Here, God’s righteousness (Rom. 1:17), is “God’s resurrection-effecting verdict that Jesus the wrath-bearing, sin-atoning, allegiant king is alone righteous—a verdict that all who are united to Jesus the representative king share” (Bates 2017, p. 181 italics in the original). Faith is understood as loyalty or trusting allegiance, which is owed to the king who is himself faithful. Such trusting results in resurrected life (Bates 2017, pp. 77–100, cf. pp. 2–5, 8–9). Justification by faith, for Bates, is not part of the gospel content; it is rather a “benefit” or “result” of the gospel that is “won” by the king for the king’s people. Pistis is required to move a person into the justified community (Bates 2023, pp. 388–89; 2017, pp. 36–38). On the purpose of the gospel, it is aimed “toward stimulating loyal obedience to the king in order to restore glory”. Allegiance is to be characterized by loyalty to the king that Christ can reign as Lord (Bates 2023, p. 390). The gospel has as its aim rescue and restoration, not only for humans but also creation.

Bates’s studies are a valuable contribution to the gospel of Paul. His elements of the gospel content help provide a nice segue into creedal statements of later centuries. The kingship of Jesus also ties in nicely with Jesus’s own prior gospel proclamation of the kingdom of God, though I would prefer the designation of “Lord” over “king” since the former is actually the term Paul repeatedly uses for Jesus. Although Rom. 1:1–4 is an important passage related to Paul’s gospel, so is 1 Cor. 15:1–7. Together, they emphasize the death and resurrection of Jesus more so than incarnation and enthronement, which Bates wants to emphasize (e.g., Bates 2023, p. 384: “In Rom. 1:1–4, the gospel is about God’s promise of the Son’s incarnation and enthronement” [italics in the original]). The themes of Jesus’s death (the cross) and resurrection (life) play prominent roles in Paul’s major letters, including Romans (e.g., Rom. 3:21–26; 6:1–23), 1 Corinthians (e.g., 1:18–32; 15:1–58), and 2 Corinthians (e.g., the death/life theme in 2 Cor. 1–7). When it comes to Paul’s gospel, then, Jesus’s death and resurrection seem to be foremost featured, though incarnation and enthronement are also surely important, and so this quibble is merely one of emphasis.

Another issue has to do with justification by faith as a benefit of the gospel but “not part of the gospel” (Bates 2023, p. 389). I am not convinced that, when it comes to Paul, a clear line can be drawn between the gospel’s content and the gospel’s benefit so as to make a consistent claim about righteousness by pistis not belonging to the gospel. Both Rom. 1:1–4 and 1:16–17 are identified as “gospel”, even if the former focuses on its content and the other on its efficacy. In Rom. 1:16–17, the revelation of God’s righteousness is revealed in the gospel, and this multifaceted righteousness, though more than merely justification, is nonetheless eventually unfolded to include it with Jews and gentiles being “righteoused” by pistis in Rom. 3:21–26. Also, if Rom. 1:16–15:13 is a sample of Paul’s gospel (cf. 1:15; 15:14–16), one of its central messages—if not the central message—is righteousness by pistis (cf. 3:20–26; 4:1–8; 10:3–17). Hence, the content of Hab. 2:4 in Rom. 1:17—“the righteous person on the basis of pistis shall live”—is thus part of Paul’s gospel mentioned in Rom. 1:16, and this is connected with the “gospel of God” promised beforehand through the prophets (like Habakkuk) in Rom. 1:1–2. Moreover, the Roman auditors would almost surely interpret Hab. 2:4 as referring to trust characterizing the righteous person, a person like themselves (and not referring to Christ, as I mentioned above in response to Campbell).

The same can be said of the use of Hab. 2:4 in Gal. 2:16, 3:10–13, and ἐκ πίστεως in Gal. 3:21 that guides the context to at least Gal. 3:26 and is found elsewhere in Galatians (see Ciampa 2023, pp. 77–94). In this letter, as Bird maintains, “when Paul defends the gospel, he does this by defending his thesis of justification by faith without works of the law” (Bird 2011, p. 133). This is a truth that originates from Paul’s gospel that stands over against the deceptive gospel of his opponents in Gal. 1:6–9 (cf. 2:5, 14). The Galatians were not straying from the content of the gospel in terms of Jesus’s incarnation and ascension, nor from his death and resurrection, but from the gospel understood in terms of salvific efficacy expressed prominently in this letter as righteousness by trust and not from works of the law. When it comes to “justification by faith”, then, Paul at times seems to allow its inclusion in the gospel, though technically speaking, we might understand pistis as the doorway through which the gospel message becomes embodied by its hearers.

6. Conclusions

The interpretation of Paul’s gospel has been worked over many times for more than a century now. Pauline scholarship has moved from the traditional Protestant perspective of theologians who popularized its critical study in the first half of the 20th century to a number of other perspectives, such as the new perspective, apocalyptic perspective, missionary view, Paul within Judaism, eclectic perspectives, and even other traditional perspectives such as Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic. At stake still is the gospel’s origin, especially the origin of the noun εὐαγγέλιον for Jesus’ believers. Did it have its beginning among the proclamations of the early Jerusalem Hebrew–Aramaic speakers (Harnack and Stuhlmacher), Hellenists (Käsemann and Frankemölle), or Paul (Dunn and Garroway)? Or did its religious use originate from the imperial cult (Strecker and Koester)? Did Scripture, particularly Isaiah, play a major or minor role in its origin? There remains no consensus regarding these issues.

Personally, I believe the gospel’s use for Jesus’ believers, including both the verb and noun (probably first in Aramaic), originated with Jesus (Mark 13:10/Matt. 24:13–14; Matt. 11:5/Luke 7:22), who derived it from Deutero-Isaiah, especially Isa. 61:1. From him, it was passed on to his disciples, translated to Greek by Hellenistic Jews, and perpetrated by Paul who emphasized εὐαγγέλιον with the recognition that his gentile converts already understood its sense in terms of lordship via the imperial cult. Even so, it is clear to me that he uses the noun and verb almost interchangeably, and most crucially when referring to his gospel in prominent texts such as Rom. 1:1–17, 1 Cor. 15:1–7, and Gal. 1:6–16. Would ancient hearers of Paul’s letters really discern a major distinction between his use of the gospel verb and noun? I seriously doubt it. Interpreters might want to consult a frequently overlooked study written decades ago by J. W. Bowman (Bowman 1959, p. 64), who discusses semitic languages and argues that the gospel as a noun “is essentially contained in the verb”, and that the Hebrew verb followed a path from the Aramaic verb and noun to the Greek verb and noun for our NT writers. As such, “it would have been natural, therefore, for Jesus along with the rest of the Jewish Aramaic-speaking community and the early Jewish Church in the days before the development of the Hellenistic mission to have employed both verb and noun for the prophetic eschatological hope and its fulfillment”. This study, then, suggests that the origin of the Christ-community’s use of εὐαγγέλιον is bound up with the community’s use of εὐαγγελίζω, and both cognates seem to be the natural outcome of how the concept was used in Aramaic by Jesus and the apostles in Jerusalem.

An important point Dunn made earlier resonates with me regarding the brief statements of Paul’s gospel as not being proclaimed in a vacuum but assuming a larger storied narrative about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus that was likely told by apostle when proclaiming his gospel. Along this line regarding Paul’s gospel, Robert Calhoun, following Margaret Mitchell, stresses the importance of rhetorical notions such as brevity (brachulogia), ellipsis, and synecdoche that operate for Paul as a type of gospel shorthand for more elaborative statements and messages (Calhoun 2011, pp. 10–84; cf. Mitchell 1994, pp. 63–88). On a similar note for Michael Wolter, we must orient ourselves to the verbs used by Paul to refer to the gospel he proclaims (κηρύσσω, εὐαγγελίζω, καταγγέλλω: 1 Cor. 9:14, 15:1; 2 Cor. 11:4, 7; Gal. 1:11, 2:2; 1 Thess. 2:9) and inquire into subjects and contents identified in such texts. The results are such things as naming that Christ was crucified (1 Cor. 1:23), is the power and wisdom of God (1 Cor. 1:24), the mystery of God (1 Cor. 2:1), is Lord (2 Cor. 4:5), Son of God (2 Cor. 1:19), “Jesus” (2 Cor. 11:4), he rose from the dead (1 Cor. 15:12), etc. As such, Jesus Christ stands for the abridgement for the “more detailed content of missionary preaching” (Wolter 2015, p. 62). Notice also Richard Hays, who suggests a deeper narrative behind Paul’s gospel—it happens “according to the Scriptures” and thus is contingent on its relation with Israel’s sacred texts (Hays 2004, p. 234). For Hays, “Paul’s narrative statements are condensed summarizations of a plotline, upon which he comments in order to demonstrate its saving significance… He assumes that his readers know the gospel story, and his pervasive concern is to draw out the implications of this story for shaping the belief and practice of his infant churches” (Hays 2004, p. 237). He continues: “To say that Paul’s soteriology is grounded in narrative is to affirm the constant intertextual character of Paul’s discourse: Paul’s letters are always in hermeneutical engagement with other ‘texts’, both Israel’s story and the early church’s narrative of the euangelion of Jesus Christ” (Hays 2004, p. 237). Hence, when Paul uses phrases such as the “word of the cross”, “Christ crucified”, “Christ raised from the dead”, pistis related to Christ, and so on, these assume that his auditors know longer narratives behind the gospel about Jesus, whether taught to them by Paul or others.

In any study of Paul’s gospel, then, it seems essential not only to investigate potential allusions to Israel’s Scripture that point to Jesus but also to consult pre-Pauline Jesus traditions that may be echoed through the apostle’s words. A third element crucial to such a study would seem to include Paul’s revelatory experiences; after all, he claims he received his gospel from such revelation (Gal. 1:11–16). If we dare to suggest that Paul may actually be remembered in Acts, perhaps his revelations in this narrative should be invited into the conversation, as well as revelations in his letters, for example, his experience in 2 Cor. 12:1–10. I suggest that Paul’s gospel developed from a spiraling relationship between his revelatory experiences, recalling and reflecting on Scripture, hearing teachings, proclaiming the gospel, hearing from the apostles, rereading Scripture again, proclaiming the gospel among gentiles, arguing with opponents, adjusting his teachings, and so on. A mature version of his gospel is something we find reflected in Romans.