Did Paul Follow the Teaching of Jesus?

Paul wrote more New Testament books than anyone else, yet he never followed Jesus in Galilee, and his letters say surprisingly little about what Jesus taught there. There are no parables in Romans and no Sermon on the Mount in Galatians. Some scholars have concluded that Paul built a religion about Jesus that had little to do with the religion of Jesus; William Wrede called him "the second founder of Christianity."

Orthodox Christians receive Paul as an apostle, so the charge deserves a careful answer. This article does not repeat the separate question of whether Paul invented belief in Christ's divinity, which the site answers in Did Paul Invent the Divinity of Jesus? The question here is narrower: did Paul know and follow what Jesus taught? The honest answer has two sides: Paul plainly knew some of Jesus's sayings and treated them as binding, but he quotes them far less often than we might expect.

In brief

Paul explicitly cites teaching of "the Lord" in a few places: the command against divorce (1 Corinthians 7:10-11), the command that preachers should live from the gospel (9:14), the words at the Last Supper (11:23-25), and a "word of the Lord" about the dead at Christ's coming (1 Thessalonians 4:15), which may or may not be a saying of the earthly Jesus. His moral teaching also echoes Gospel sayings: blessing persecutors, repaying no one evil for evil, love of neighbor as the summary of the Law. Scholars who stress discontinuity (Wrede, Schweitzer, Bultmann, Lüdemann) note how rarely Paul names Jesus as his source; those who stress continuity (Davies, Allison, Wenham, Dunn) argue that the letters presuppose teaching already handed on in person. The evidence supports a real, if partly hidden, dependence.

Thesis: Paul's letters show an apostle who knew sayings of Jesus, treated them as the Lord's authoritative word and applied their substance to new churches, so the "second founder" thesis is not supported, even though the sparseness of his quotations is a real puzzle that no single explanation solves.

Why the question arises

The classic statement of the case is Wrede's short book Paulus (1904), translated into English in 1907. Wrede argued that Paul's religion rested on "acts of salvation," the incarnation, death and resurrection of a heavenly being, which he thought had no real place in the preaching of Jesus. His conclusion was blunt: "Paul is to be regarded as the second founder of Christianity."¹ The name "disciple of Jesus," he wrote, "has little applicability to Paul, if it is used to denote an historical relation."²

Albert Schweitzer put the textual problem memorably: "If we had been dependent on him for our knowledge, we should not have known that Jesus spoke in parables, preached the Sermon on the Mount, or taught His disciples the Lord's Prayer."³ Rudolf Bultmann went further: "the teaching of the historical Jesus plays no role, or practically none, in Paul."⁴ In 2002 Gerd Lüdemann published Paul: The Founder of Christianity, which his publisher described as showing that Paul's theology "differs significantly from what we now know the historical Jesus to have preached."⁵

The ancient Church met the question too, from opposite directions. St Irenaeus of Lyons reports that the Ebionites "repudiate the Apostle Paul, maintaining that he was an apostate from the law," while the followers of Marcion claimed "that Paul alone knew the truth."⁶ Against the claim that Paul alone knew the truth, Irenaeus appealed to Paul's own words: "whether it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed" (1 Corinthians 15:11). The site's article on Marcion tells that part of the story.

Where Paul cites the Lord

Divorce: "not I but the Lord"

Paul writes (Scripture is quoted from the NKJV): "Now to the married I command, yet not I but the Lord: A wife is not to depart from her husband... And a husband is not to divorce his wife" (1 Corinthians 7:10-11). This corresponds to Jesus's words in Mark 10:11: "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her." Then Paul marks a contrast: "But to the rest I, not the Lord, say," and he gives guidance on marriages to unbelievers, which Jesus had not covered (7:12). Of virgins he says, "I have no commandment from the Lord; yet I give judgment" (7:25).

{{very-strong: Paul knew a teaching of Jesus on divorce, distinguished it from his own rulings, and treated it as binding on the churches.}} The distinction is telling: where Paul had no saying, he said so. St John Chrysostom drew the same conclusion. Paul says "not I" because this was "a law expressly appointed by Christ," so "the words I and not I have this difference of meaning." Chrysostom adds that Paul's own rulings carry authority too, since Paul wrote, "I think I also have the Spirit of God" (7:40).⁷ The site reads the whole chapter in Paul on Marriage, Sex and Celibacy.

Support for preachers

"Even so the Lord has commanded that those who preach the gospel should live from the gospel" (1 Corinthians 9:14). This matches Jesus's instruction to the disciples he sent out: "eating and drinking such things as they give, for the laborer is worthy of his wages" (Luke 10:7). The surprise is that Paul then says he has not used this right (9:15). David Horrell has devoted a study to these two verses and the wider questions they raise about how Paul used a word of the Lord.⁸ A common reading is that he took the command as a right granted to missionaries, not a duty.

The Lord's Supper

The longest citation is the Last Supper: "For I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you: that the Lord Jesus on the same night in which He was betrayed took bread; and when He had given thanks, He broke it and said, 'Take, eat; this is My body which is broken for you; do this in remembrance of Me.' In the same manner He also took the cup after supper, saying, 'This cup is the new covenant in My blood'" (1 Corinthians 11:23-25). The wording is very close to Luke 22:19-20, including "do this in remembrance of Me" and "the new covenant in My blood."

Paul had already "delivered" this to the Corinthians when he was with them. "Received" and "delivered" are the language of handing on tradition, the same pair Paul uses for the resurrection creed in 1 Corinthians 15:3. The site discusses its Eucharistic meaning in Paul and the Eucharist.

"By the word of the Lord"

"For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep" (1 Thessalonians 4:15). Paul goes on to describe the Lord descending "with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God." This recalls Matthew 24:31, "He will send His angels with a great sound of a trumpet," but no Gospel has a saying about the living not preceding the dead.

{{debated: Whether the "word of the Lord" in 1 Thessalonians 4:15 is a saying of the earthly Jesus or a revelation from the risen Christ is unresolved.}} Chrysostom tied it to no Gospel passage. He read it as "we speak not of ourselves, but having learned from Christ," said that Paul "heard even expressly from God" what he wrote here, and set it beside the unrecorded saying of Acts 20:35.⁹ Schweitzer likewise took it as a word "revealed to him by the Spirit of Christ."¹⁰ It is weak evidence for Paul's use of sayings we can check.

A saying the Gospels do not record

In Acts, Paul tells the Ephesian elders to "remember the words of the Lord Jesus, that He said, 'It is more blessed to give than to receive'" (Acts 20:35). No Gospel contains this saying. It is Luke's report, not Paul's letter, but it shows early Christians remembering sayings the Gospels did not record. Chrysostom says Paul "heard among things not recorded."¹¹ (1 Timothy 5:18 quotes "The laborer is worthy of his wages" as Scripture, but because many scholars doubt Paul wrote 1 Timothy, this article does not lean on it; see Which Letters Did Paul Actually Write?)

Echoes of the Sermon on the Mount

Most of the evidence for continuity is echo rather than quotation. Paul's moral teaching often says what Jesus said, in similar words, without naming him:

Paul	Gospels
"Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse" (Romans 12:14)	"Bless those who curse you, and pray for those who spitefully use you" (Luke 6:28; compare Matthew 5:44)
"Repay no one evil for evil" (Romans 12:17)	"I tell you not to resist an evil person" (Matthew 5:39)
The commandments "are all summed up in this saying, namely, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself'" (Romans 13:9; Galatians 5:14)	Love of neighbor as the second great commandment (Mark 12:31)
"I know and am convinced by the Lord Jesus that there is nothing unclean of itself" (Romans 14:14)	"There is nothing that enters a man from outside which can defile him" (Mark 7:15)
"The day of the Lord so comes as a thief in the night" (1 Thessalonians 5:2)	"If the master of the house had known what hour the thief would come..." (Matthew 24:43)
"Abba, Father" as the cry of believers (Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6)	Jesus prays "Abba, Father" in Gethsemane (Mark 14:36)

{{strong: Paul's ethical teaching, especially in Romans 12-14, repeatedly echoes sayings of Jesus preserved in the Gospels.}} Romans 14:14 is the most suggestive, because Paul says he is persuaded "by the Lord Jesus" on the very question Jesus addressed in Mark 7. Paul also speaks of "the law of Christ" (Galatians 6:2).

How much the echoes prove is disputed. Wrede himself granted that "many precepts and rules of Jesus were traditionally known to Paul, and he assuredly regarded them as of standard authority," but said that an echo of Jesus in an exhortation like "bless your persecutors," though "quite possible," is "not certain, for Judaism was also acquainted with such thoughts."¹² That caution is fair: love of neighbor quotes Leviticus 19:18, and an echo shows shared content, not the direction of influence.

Dale Allison's 1982 study in New Testament Studies began by admitting that "The debate has not issued in any consensus."¹³ He argued that the Jesus tradition known to Paul "circulated in small blocks which laid claim to embody sayings of Jesus," and concluded that "the persistent conviction that Paul knew next to nothing of the teaching of Jesus must be rejected."¹⁴ If sayings circulated in recognizable groups, a series of echoes from one group is harder to dismiss as coincidence.

Why does Paul quote Jesus so seldom?

Scholars who see strong continuity admit the difficulty. Wenham calls Paul's failure "to refer much to Jesus's life or teaching" one of the most embarrassing facts for those who see Paul as a follower of Jesus.¹⁵ Estimates of clear references range from fewer than a dozen (Victor Paul Furnish) to four or even fewer (Nikolaus Walter).¹⁶ Schweitzer noted that Paul summarizes the Law as love of neighbor "without making any references to the fact that Jesus Himself had spoken to this effect."¹⁷ A. J. M. Wedderburn listed other places where a saying of Jesus would have suited Paul's argument, such as virgins, government, and clean and unclean food.¹⁸ Several explanations are offered:

• The teaching had already been delivered. Paul praises the Corinthians for keeping "the traditions just as I delivered them to you" (1 Corinthians 11:2) and tells the Thessalonians to "hold the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle" (2 Thessalonians 2:15).
• Letters answer problems. Paul's letters respond to particular crises; they are not catechisms. Allison argued that in the letters Paul "merely refers to the Jesus tradition; he never hands it down."¹⁹
• Allusion assumes shared knowledge. Dunn argues that communities bound by a common tradition communicate by echo, so the allusions in Paul's moral teaching are "just what we would expect."²⁰
• The pattern is not peculiar to Paul. The other New Testament letters also rarely quote Jesus. James is widely seen as shaped by Jesus's teaching yet never quotes him directly, and Luke seldom quotes Jesus in Acts. If silence proved ignorance, it would prove too much.²¹
• The cross dominated. Paul resolved to know nothing "except Jesus Christ and Him crucified" (1 Corinthians 2:2).

{{moderate: Paul probably knew considerably more of the Jesus tradition than his letters quote.}} That rests on inference. Paul stayed fifteen days with Peter and met James, "the Lord's brother" (Galatians 1:18-19); later James, Cephas and John gave him "the right hand of fellowship" (2:9). What Paul learned there is not recorded.

Discontinuity and continuity: the scholars

Discontinuity. Wrede argued that the substance differs: Jesus called individuals to wholehearted obedience, while Paul's religion rests on divine acts that save the world. "Of that which is to Paul all and everything, how much does Jesus know? Nothing whatever."²² Lüdemann's publisher summarizes his view that Paul "never knew Jesus" and so "was not in a position to give an accurate representation of Jesus' teachings."²³ Mediating scholars such as Walter hold that Paul's Hellenistic churches cultivated only parts of the tradition, chiefly what served the Gentile mission, and that Paul embraced, modified or neglected different parts of it.²⁴

Continuity. W. D. Davies argued that "Paul is steeped in the mind and words of his Lord."²⁵ Wenham's Paul: Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity? (1995) compares the two on the kingdom of God, the identity of Jesus, the meaning of his death, Israel and the Church, ethics and the end, building a cumulative case from explicit "tradition indicators" such as 1 Corinthians 7:10 and from fainter echoes.²⁶ Dunn's Jesus, Paul, and the Gospels (2011) rejects the "second founder" label, arguing that both proclaim God's saving action as good news for sinners and ground ethics in "the law of love."²⁷

The discontinuity case is right that Paul's vocabulary differs: he speaks of the kingdom less often (though see Romans 14:17), and his teaching on justification has no exact Synoptic counterpart. But the strongest discontinuity claims rest on a prior judgment about Jesus himself. Wrede judged it improbable that Jesus ever assigned saving power to his death, and he treated Mark 10:45, "to give His life a ransom for many," as a thought that had "once or twice made its way into the gospels."²⁸ If Jesus did give the cup as "the new covenant in My blood," as Paul reports from tradition earlier than his letter, the distance between Jesus's teaching and Paul's gospel shrinks sharply.

How the Church reads Paul and Jesus

The Orthodox Church does not treat Paul as an independent founder whose ideas must be checked against a reconstructed Jesus. It receives him as an apostle within the one apostolic tradition, and reads his letters with the Gospels as a single witness to the one Lord. That is what Irenaeus defended: "our Lord never came to save Paul alone, nor is God so limited in means, that He should have but one apostle who knew the dispensation of His Son."²⁹ The writers in the site's Church Fathers guide cite Paul and the Gospels side by side as a matter of course.

The Divine Liturgy makes the point every Sunday. At the words of institution the priest says: "Take and eat, This is My Body which is broken for you for the remission of sins."³⁰ "Broken for you" comes from Paul's account (1 Corinthians 11:24, in the Byzantine text the NKJV follows); "for the remission of sins" is drawn from Matthew's words over the cup (26:28).

Orthodox reading also stresses that Paul followed Jesus as the risen Lord, not only as a remembered teacher. 2 Corinthians 5:16 ("Even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know Him thus no longer") was once read as indifference to the earthly Jesus. Chrysostom rejected any idea that Christ had left his humanity behind: "Did He put away the flesh, and is He now not with that body? Away with the thought, for He is even now clothed in flesh."³¹ Walter spoke of "widespread agreement" that Paul's disinterest cannot be inferred from this verse.³² The crucified Jesus of Nazareth and the glorified Lord are one Person, so to follow the risen Christ is to follow the one who taught in Galilee. Paul appeals to "the meekness and gentleness of Christ" (2 Corinthians 10:1).

That Paul is a true apostle and his letters are Scripture is the Church's settled faith. How many sayings he knew is a historical question Orthodox scholars can weigh like anyone else.

The strongest objections

"Paul says his gospel did not come from any human being"

"For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came through the revelation of Jesus Christ" (Galatians 1:12). If Paul learned nothing from others, the argument runs, he cannot be passing on Jesus's teaching. But Galatians defends the source of his commission, "not from men nor through man" (1:1). The same Paul "received" and "delivered" the Supper tradition and the resurrection creed (1 Corinthians 11:23; 15:3), and in Galatians he lays his gospel before the Jerusalem leaders "lest by any means I might run, or had run, in vain" (2:2). He claimed an independent call and a shared message; see Did Paul Hijack the Jerusalem Church?

"Jesus preached the kingdom; Paul preached Jesus"

The emphasis does shift after Easter: the one who proclaimed the kingdom becomes the center of the proclamation. But the kingdom does not vanish from Paul (1 Thessalonians 2:12), and whether his focus on the cross betrays Jesus depends on whether Jesus spoke of his death as saving. The Supper words Paul hands on point to such teaching earlier than any written Gospel.

"The parallels may run from Paul to the Gospels"

Wrede argued that a great part of the Synoptic material "came into being alongside or after" Paul's theology.³³ Some parallels could reflect Pauline influence on the Gospel writers, an objection Wenham anticipates.³⁴ That is fair for individual verses. It is much less likely for the Supper tradition, which Paul says he received, and for the divorce saying, which he attributes to the Lord in contrast to his own words.

"Paul felt free to modify Jesus"

Paul says a believer whose unbelieving spouse departs "is not under bondage in such cases" (1 Corinthians 7:15), and he declines the support Jesus authorized (9:15). Yet he states the Lord's word first and marks his own ruling as distinct, as one would when applying an authoritative saying to new circumstances.

What we can say confidently

• Paul explicitly attributes at least three teachings to the Lord: on divorce, on support for preachers, and the words at the Last Supper.
• Paul distinguishes the Lord's commands from his own rulings and does not invent sayings where he has none.
• The Supper tradition in 1 Corinthians 11 closely matches Luke 22:19-20 and was handed on before the letter was written.
• Paul's moral teaching repeatedly echoes sayings found in the Gospels, especially in Romans 12-14.
• Even Wrede accepted that Paul knew precepts of Jesus and regarded them as authoritative.
• The sparseness of Paul's quotations of Jesus is real, and the other New Testament letters share it.

What remains disputed

• How many sayings Paul knew: estimates of clear references range from four or fewer to about a dozen.
• Whether 1 Thessalonians 4:15 records a saying of the earthly Jesus or a revelation.
• Whether "I received from the Lord" (1 Corinthians 11:23) means tradition handed on in the Church, direct revelation, or both.
• Which parallels reflect Jesus's teaching rather than shared Jewish moral teaching or later Christian usage.
• Why Paul so rarely names Jesus as his source; several explanations are plausible, none decisive.
• How far Paul's theology of the cross and justification develops what Jesus taught, a question that turns on judgments about the historical Jesus himself.

Conclusion

The evidence shows an apostle who handed on the Lord's words where he had them, marked his own rulings where he did not, and filled his moral teaching with the substance of Jesus's commands. The puzzle of his reticence is real. But the man who wrote "not I but the Lord" did not think of himself as a second founder, and the earliest Church, from Irenaeus onward, did not read him that way.

For Orthodox Christians the deeper continuity is personal. Paul followed the same Jesus who blessed those who cursed him, gave the bread and cup on the night he was betrayed, and rose from the dead. At every Liturgy the Church hears Paul's account of that night joined to the Gospel's, and receives what Paul received.

Notes

1. William Wrede, Paul, trans. Edward Lummis (London: Philip Green, 1907), 179; on the "acts of salvation," 178-79. German original: Paulus (author's preface dated Breslau, 5 December 1904). ↩
2. Wrede, Paul, 165. ↩
3. Albert Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, trans. William Montgomery (New York: Henry Holt, 1931), 173. German original: Die Mystik des Apostels Paulus (author's preface dated 1929). ↩
4. Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, vol. 1 (New York, 1951), 35, as quoted in the opening extract of Dale C. Allison Jr., "The Pauline Epistles and the Synoptic Gospels: The Pattern of the Parallels," New Testament Studies 28, no. 1 (1982): 1 and n. 3. Bultmann's book itself was not opened for this article. ↩
5. Prometheus Books news release (October 2002) for Gerd Lüdemann, Paul: The Founder of Christianity (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2002), reproduced on Lüdemann's university homepage. ↩
6. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.26.2 (Ebionites) and 3.13.1 (Marcionites; 1 Corinthians 15:11), trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1 (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1885). ↩
7. John Chrysostom, Homilies on First Corinthians 19.4, trans. Talbot W. Chambers, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st series, vol. 12 (1889). ↩
8. David Horrell, "'The Lord Commanded... but I Have Not Used...': Exegetical and Hermeneutical Reflections on 1 Cor 9.14-15," New Testament Studies 43, no. 4 (1997): 587-603. ↩
9. John Chrysostom, Homilies on First Thessalonians 7 ("having learned from Christ") and 8 ("heard even expressly from God", with Acts 20:35), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st series, vol. 13 (1889); translation as credited by New Advent to John A. Broadus. ↩
10. Schweitzer, Mysticism of Paul, 172. ↩
11. Chrysostom, Homilies on First Thessalonians 8. ↩
12. Wrede, Paul, 158-59. ↩
13. Allison, "Pauline Epistles and the Synoptic Gospels," 1 (extract); the "small blocks" quotation is from p. 23, as quoted by Miller, "Paul and the Words of Jesus," 54 n. 62. ↩
14. Timothy E. Miller, "Paul and the Words of Jesus: On the Infrequence of Paul's Use of Jesus's Words," Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal 23 (2018): 43-44, quoting Allison, "Pauline Epistles," 25. ↩
15. David Wenham, Paul: Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 3, as quoted by Miller, "Paul and the Words of Jesus," 41. ↩
16. Miller, "Paul and the Words of Jesus," 49 ("four or even fewer" is Miller's summary of Walter), citing Victor Paul Furnish, Theology and Ethics in Paul (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009 reprint), 59, and Nikolaus Walter, "Paul and the Early Christian Jesus-Tradition," in A. J. M. Wedderburn, ed., Paul and Jesus: Collected Essays (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1989), 54. ↩
17. Schweitzer, Mysticism of Paul, 173. ↩
18. A. J. M. Wedderburn, "Paul and Jesus: Similarity and Continuity," in Wedderburn, ed., Paul and Jesus, 117-18 n. 1 (comparing Matthew 19:10-12, Mark 12:17 and Mark 7:15), as summarized by Miller, "Paul and the Words of Jesus," 53. See also Wedderburn, "Paul and Jesus: The Problem of Continuity," Scottish Journal of Theology 38, no. 2 (1985): 189-203. ↩
19. Allison, "Pauline Epistles," 21-22, as quoted by Miller, "Paul and the Words of Jesus," 53. ↩
20. James D. G. Dunn, "Jesus Tradition in Paul," in Bruce Chilton and Craig A. Evans, eds., Studying the Historical Jesus: Evaluations of the State of Current Research (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 177, as quoted by Miller, "Paul and the Words of Jesus," 52. ↩
21. Miller, "Paul and the Words of Jesus," 49-51, drawing on Michael Thompson, Clothed with Christ (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991), and Seyoon Kim, "Sayings of Jesus," in Dictionary of Paul and His Letters. ↩
22. Wrede, Paul, 163. ↩
23. Prometheus Books news release for Lüdemann, Paul: The Founder of Christianity (note 5). ↩
24. Walter, "Paul and the Early Christian Jesus-Tradition," 74-80, as summarized by Miller, "Paul and the Words of Jesus," 43 (Miller calls this the "Paul beside Jesus" position). ↩
25. Allison, "Pauline Epistles," 1 (extract) and n. 2, quoting W. D. Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, rev. ed. (New York, 1967), 140 (first published 1948). Davies's book itself was not opened for this article. ↩
26. Frank Thielman, review of Wenham, Paul: Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity?, Themelios 22, no. 1. ↩
27. Phillip J. Long, review of James D. G. Dunn, Jesus, Paul, and the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), Reading Acts, 11 March 2012. ↩
28. Wrede, Paul, 163-64 and 164 n. 1 (citing Mark 10:45 and 14:24, so Wrede also set aside the cup-word cited in the next sentence). ↩
29. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.13.1 (ANF 1). ↩
30. The Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, Anaphora, English text of the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese (acrod.org). English translations of the Liturgy vary slightly. ↩
31. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Second Corinthians 11.3, trans. Talbot W. Chambers, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st series, vol. 12 (1889). ↩
32. Miller, "Paul and the Words of Jesus," 46 n. 29, citing Walter, "Paul and the Early Christian Jesus-Tradition," 60. ↩
33. Wrede, Paul, 155. ↩
34. Thielman, review of Wenham (note 26). ↩

Bibliography

Primary sources

• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.
• The Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom. English text, American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese of the USA. https://www.acrod.org/prayercorner/liturgicaltexts/divineliturgy

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies. Translated by Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut. Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885. Revised edition at newadvent.org.
• John Chrysostom. Homilies on First and Second Corinthians. Translated by Talbot W. Chambers. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st series, vol. 12. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1889. Revised edition at newadvent.org.
• John Chrysostom. Homilies on First Thessalonians. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st series, vol. 13. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1889. Revised edition at newadvent.org.

Other scholarship (including scholars who disagree)

• Allison, Dale C., Jr. "The Pauline Epistles and the Synoptic Gospels: The Pattern of the Parallels." New Testament Studies 28, no. 1 (1982): 1-32. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0028688500007232
• Dunn, James D. G. Jesus, Paul, and the Gospels. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011.
• Dunn, James D. G. "Jesus Tradition in Paul." In Studying the Historical Jesus: Evaluations of the State of Current Research, edited by Bruce Chilton and Craig A. Evans. New Testament Tools and Studies 19. Leiden: Brill, 1994.
• Furnish, Victor Paul. Theology and Ethics in Paul. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009 (reissue; cited at second hand).
• Horrell, David. "'The Lord Commanded... but I Have Not Used...': Exegetical and Hermeneutical Reflections on 1 Cor 9.14-15." New Testament Studies 43, no. 4 (1997): 587-603. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0028688500023407
• Long, Phillip J. Review of Jesus, Paul, and the Gospels, by James D. G. Dunn. Reading Acts, 11 March 2012.
• Miller, Timothy E. "Paul and the Words of Jesus: On the Infrequence of Paul's Use of Jesus's Words." Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal 23 (2018): 41-58.
• Thielman, Frank. Review of Paul: Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity?, by David Wenham. Themelios 22, no. 1.
• Wedderburn, A. J. M., ed. Paul and Jesus: Collected Essays. Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series 37. Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1989.
• Wedderburn, A. J. M. "Paul and Jesus: The Problem of Continuity." Scottish Journal of Theology 38, no. 2 (1985): 189-203. https://doi.org/10.1017/S003693060004134X
• Wenham, David. Paul: Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity? Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995.

Sources from the tradition being discussed (critical scholarship arguing for discontinuity)

• Bultmann, Rudolf. Theology of the New Testament. Vol. 1. English translation. New York, 1951. (Quoted at second hand, from Allison's article.)
• Lüdemann, Gerd. Paul: The Founder of Christianity. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002.
• Schweitzer, Albert. The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle. Translated by William Montgomery. New York: Henry Holt, 1931.
• Wrede, William. Paul. Translated by Edward Lummis. London: Philip Green, 1907.