The claim is simple: Jesus taught love and Paul added rules, so where Paul is hard you may set him aside. This guide tests that claim by reading. It sets the passages that make Paul seem to contradict Jesus beside what Jesus says in the Gospels. Then it asks whether the two really conflict or only look that way when each verse is read alone. Work through it alone over two or three sittings, or with a group in about an hour. Have a Bible open. Read every passage named, not just the lines quoted here.
The conversation behind this guide is a Jude 3 Project podcast episode with Lisa Fields, the founder of Jude 3 Project, and Dr. Esau McCaulley, who teaches at Wheaton College. Lisa names the passages that drive the debate. She says people use the line Paul is my brother, Jesus is my savior to mean “I don’t have to listen to Paul in an authoritative way” on gender, sexuality and slavery. Those three subjects give the guide its shape. Each one gets its own reading.
Begin with your own list
Before reading further, write down the Pauline verses you have heard quoted against him. Next to each, write what you think Jesus would say on the same subject, and where in the Gospels you would look to check. Leave a blank where you are not sure. This list is your starting point. You will return to it at the end and see what changed.
For groups, have people work alone for five minutes, then compare lists. Do not argue the verses yet. Simply notice which ones come up most often. Those are the passages carrying the weight of the claim.
First reading: who sets the higher bar on desire?
Start where the stereotype starts. McCaulley names it directly: “people tend to say Jesus is nice, Paul is mean.” Test that by reading two passages on sexual ethics side by side.
Read Matthew 5:27-30. Jesus says, “Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart” (Matthew 5:27-28). Now read 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, which opens, “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God?” (1 Corinthians 6:9) and goes on to list behaviors.
Observe before you interpret. Which passage addresses actions? Which reaches into the heart? Which one says more about what a person may not even want?
The answer runs against the stereotype. Paul names deeds. Jesus names desire. McCaulley’s summary of the Sermon on the Mount is that “Jesus is the one who goes beyond actions to intent.” He describes Jesus as saying, in effect, “I want to go beyond the surface level of what the scripture says to the heart of the scripture.”
So why does Paul sound harsher? McCaulley’s answer is about audience, not content. Jesus spoke to Jewish hearers who, at least by profession, already accepted the law of Moses. He could say “ye have heard” and build upward. Paul wrote mostly to Gentiles, and McCaulley observes that “Paul can’t begin with the ethical basis of Judaism and build from there.” In his reading, Paul’s lists restate the moral core of the commandments for people who had never been taught them. The difference in tone comes from the starting point. The two men are not disagreeing about the goal.
Notice also the end of the Corinthian passage. Verse 11 tells the readers that some of them had been these very things and had been washed. The list does not stand alone. It sits inside a claim about what God has already done for them.
Second reading: slavery, and where a text stops
This is the hardest of the three, and the guide will not soften it. Paul writes, “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ” (Ephesians 6:5). McCaulley does not argue around passages like this. “To say they don’t exist in the Bible would be, like, an unserious argument.” He also grants plainly: “Paul doesn’t call for abolition.”
The question is what to do with that. Read the surrounding verses before deciding.
- Ephesians 6:9 turns to the masters: “And, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him.” Who does Paul say stands over the master?
- 1 Corinthians 7:21 reads, “Art thou called being a servant? care not for it: but if thou mayest be made free, use it rather.” Does Paul treat freedom as a matter of indifference, or as something to take when possible?
- Read the short letter to Philemon in full. In verse 16 Paul asks that Onesimus be received “Not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved.” What does that request do to the relationship between the two men?
- Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Now set those beside the Gospels. Jesus says, “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets” (Matthew 7:12). In Nazareth he reads that he has been sent “to preach deliverance to the captives” and “to set at liberty them that are bruised” (Luke 4:18). Paul himself writes, “For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Galatians 5:14).
McCaulley explains how enslavers handled these texts. In his account, “the slave masters wanted to use the Bible as the ceiling and not the floor.” They took the household instructions as the most Scripture could ever ask of them and stopped reading. The Black abolitionists he studies read the whole canon instead: the love command, Jesus’ identification with the least in Matthew 25, the prophets, the Torah’s laws against returning an escaped servant and against kidnapping, the Exodus, and “Paul’s statement about our essential equality in Christ.” From all of that together, McCaulley says, they concluded that “the weight of the evidence goes towards setting people free.”
They also read Paul in his setting. The first Christians were a small, powerless minority under an empire, with no vote and often no citizenship. According to McCaulley, the abolitionists argued that “to treat Paul as the maximum that is required in a context we have all of the power misunderstands what he’s trying to do.”
Weigh it fairly. This is an interpretive argument, and a reader should test it. Does Paul’s silence on abolition mean he approved of the institution? Or do his instructions regulate a world he could not change while planting claims, such as equality in Christ and a shared Master in heaven, that work against it? Distinguish what the text describes and regulates from what it commands as a permanent ideal. Then ask which reading accounts for more of the passages you just read.
Third reading: women, where faithful readers differ
Read 1 Timothy 2:11-15, including “But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence” (1 Timothy 2:12). Then read Romans 16:1-7. Paul opens, “I commend unto you Phebe our sister, which is a servant of the church which is at Cenchrea” (Romans 16:1). He greets Priscilla as a fellow worker and names Junia in verse 7. Then turn to the Gospels: the women who traveled with Jesus and supported his work (Luke 8:1-3), and the women who were first sent to tell of the empty tomb (Matthew 28:1-10).
Here the guide does not hand you a verdict. Faithful Christians who hold a high view of Scripture land on both sides of this question. Jude 3 Project deliberately takes no house position on it. Complementarian readers hold that 1 Timothy 2 reserves some teaching or governing roles in the church for men, and they read Romans 16 as describing real but different service. Egalitarian readers hold that 1 Timothy 2 addresses a specific situation in Ephesus. They read Romans 16 and the Gospels as showing women at every level of ministry.
McCaulley leans toward the second view. He says the Pauline texts used to exclude women from ministry “have been interpreted differently by people who have high views of scripture,” and that “there is a strong case that Paul believed that men and women should work together in the preaching and teaching ministry of the church.” Whatever you conclude, notice that both sides argue from Paul’s own letters. Neither side needs to set Paul against Jesus to make its case. The disagreement is about how to read Paul, which is a different question from whether to listen to him.
Facilitator note. This section can heat up quickly. Before anyone responds, ask each person to restate the view they disagree with in a way its holders would accept. Only then move on.
Fourth reading: sexuality and the whole canon
The claim here is that a few verses in Paul are the only reason Christians hold their sexual ethic, so removing Paul removes the ethic. Test that by reading Jesus first. In Matthew 19:3-6, asked about divorce, Jesus goes back to Genesis. He cites the Creator making them male and female, and a man leaving his parents to be joined to his wife. In Mark 7:20-23 he lists sexual sins among the things that come out of the heart.
McCaulley’s point is that Christian ethics are drawn from the whole of Scripture: the Torah, the Psalms, the prophets, the Gospels and the letters together. The idea that “the only thing that’s informing Christian ethics is the reading of a few Pauline texts is just simply not true,” he says. Jude 3 Project holds the historic Christian ethic that sexual intimacy belongs within the marriage of one man and one woman. It holds that ethic alongside a genuine welcome and honesty about the ways the church has wounded people.
Reading the whole argument matters here too. If your group turns to Romans 1, keep going into Romans 2 and 3. Paul’s argument does not stop at one group’s sin. It ends with the claim that “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Everyone reading the passage stands on level ground. Some people in your group may be reading this section about their own lives. Read it as a passage about all of you, never as a verdict on one person in the room.
The question under all four readings
By now a pattern should be visible. In each case the supposed contradiction weakened once the passages were read in context and beside each other. That does not make every hard text easy. It shows that the real disagreement lies somewhere else.
McCaulley locates it precisely. He grants that “slogans always communicate a half-truth,” and he grants the true half: “Jesus is God, Paul ain’t God.” The real question, he says, is whether God inspired the letters as well as the Gospels. He defines inspiration simply: “was God at work in the composition of these texts?” This is the key observation for a reader. We do not hear Jesus apart from Scripture. We meet him through Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, human authors just as Paul was. So the slogan cannot trust the Gospels and dismiss the letters on the grounds that a human wrote them.
McCaulley adds a warning: “there’s a long history of people editing the Bible to suit their own needs, and that has not always ended well.” The enslavers in the second reading were editors. They kept the verses that served them and stopped. Cutting Paul uses the same method in the opposite direction.
A practice: three columns
Choose one Pauline passage from your opening list that still troubles you. On a page, draw three columns.
- The verse alone. Copy it out. Write the conclusion someone would draw if this were the only verse they read.
- The passage. Read the whole chapter, and the next one if the argument continues. Who is Paul writing to? What problem is he addressing? Is he describing a situation, regulating it or commanding something? Write what the verse is doing in his argument.
- The Gospels. Find at least two places where Jesus addresses the same subject. Use a concordance or the cross-references in your Bible. Write whether Jesus says the same thing, something higher, something that reframes it, or something that seems to pull the other way.
Then answer in one sentence: does the contradiction survive all three columns, shrink, or disappear? Be honest if it survives. Write down what further evidence would settle it. Working alone, keep the page and repeat the practice with a second passage next week. In a group, pair people on the same passage and compare their third columns.
For discussion
- Look again at the list you made at the start. Which passage changed most for you after it was read in context, and what exactly changed: its meaning, its tone or your sense of who it was written to?
- In the first reading, Jesus addresses desire and Paul addresses deeds. Does that make Jesus more demanding, more merciful, or both? What in Matthew 5 supports your answer?
- McCaulley describes the enslavers treating Paul as a ceiling. Where in your own reading do you treat a verse as the most God could ask, when it may be the least?
- On the question of women in ministry, restate the view you do not hold in its strongest form. Which verse does that view explain better than yours?
- If the same God was at work in the Gospels and the letters, how should a hard passage in Paul change the way you read an easy passage in the Gospels?
- Was there a passage where the tension did not go away? What would it look like to keep reading it rather than set it aside?
What to carry from here
The test of this guide is not whether every hard text now feels comfortable. McCaulley himself says he had questions about these texts. The test is whether you now read a disputed verse differently: in its chapter, for its first readers, beside the words of Jesus, and as part of one book. Return to the passage you chose for the three-column practice in a month. Read it again from the beginning, and see whether you are still reading the whole Bible or have drifted back to an edited one.