It is fair as a statement of rank and unfair as a method. Every Christian already ranks Jesus above Paul. The trouble comes with the next step. Once Paul is only a brother, his letters become advice a reader may decline. That step answers the question that actually matters without arguing it: did God inspire Paul’s letters the way he inspired the Gospels? For Black Christians, the move carries a further cost. It concedes the Bible to the enslavers who once quoted Paul against Black people, and it overrules the Black believers who read Paul differently.
What Is the Slogan Really Claiming?
The slogan has a specific job. Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, describes how she hears it used: people take it to mean “I don’t have to listen to Paul in an authoritative way” on gender, sexuality and slavery. Those three subjects are the point. Nobody invokes the slogan to escape Paul on grace or the resurrection. Fields suspects the root problem is “maybe a misunderstanding of what Paul is communicating,” and the rest of this article tests that suspicion.
Dr. Esau McCaulley, who teaches New Testament at Wheaton College and wrote Reading While Black, begins with how slogans work: “slogans always communicate a half-truth.” The true half is obvious: “Jesus is God, Paul ain’t God.” No serious Christian treats the apostle as a rival to the Lord he served.
The false half slips in behind that agreement. The real issue, McCaulley says, is whether “the same God who inspired Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John also inspire Romans, First Corinthians, and Second Corinthians.” The slogan compares two persons. The actual dispute compares two sets of documents. Nobody today hears Jesus directly. We meet him through human authors who believed God was at work in their writing. So a reader cannot keep the Gospels as divine and dismiss the letters as human on the grounds that a human wrote them. Humans wrote both.
McCaulley’s definition of inspiration is simple: “was God at work in the composition of these texts?” He grants that people wrote the Bible and argues that this is how God has always spoken: “Like, the idea that God couldn’t use a fallible person to tell us something true would simply just mean God couldn’t communicate.” Calling Paul “just a man” therefore proves nothing. “It’s not actually making an argument, it’s just an assertion.”
Taking the Bible seriously means studying it honestly rather than defensively, and that standard cuts against the slogan. A hard passage in Paul calls for closer reading. Cutting him out skips the reading entirely.
Where Did the Paul-Versus-Jesus Idea Come From?
The slogan often presents itself as liberation from a Bible shaped by white power. Fields raised the irony directly. Critics who say they are removing a white supremacist framework from Paul, she observed, are “also using a white supremacist framework through German scholarship.”
McCaulley fills in the history. The skepticism behind the slogan belongs to what is called higher criticism: doubt about miracles, doubt about inspiration and more hostile readings of Paul. He places it in the majority-white mainline traditions of the early twentieth century and says plainly that “those things do come from Germany. They come from Europe.” Those ideas were later adopted in certain Black spaces, with questions of race and justice layered on top. “It was dipped in chocolate,” he says, but the core stayed the same: “This is the same argument that white scholars had.”
He presses further. The European scholars behind this skepticism were themselves racist, and progressive institutions have their own record of shutting Black people out. “The idea that progressivism is going to protect us from anti-Black racism is historically not true.” He is not defending evangelical institutions either, and his aim is not to win a contest over who is more colonized. He wants to show that tying an idea to white people says nothing about whether the idea is true.
That point also answers the charge that belief in inspiration is internalized white supremacy. McCaulley did not learn the doctrine from white scholars. He learned it in the Black church in Huntsville, Alabama, where he grew up, and he traces it back through his grandfather and the Black church across the South. Further back still, the doctrine predates modern ideas of race. The prophets claimed that the word of the Lord came to them. The early church treated these texts as authoritative before Christianity held any imperial power. Churches in Ethiopia and Syria, with their own doctrines on other matters, took these texts seriously far from any white supremacist influence. Scripture states the claim itself:
“For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” (2 Peter 1:21)
Linking inspiration to whiteness is, in McCaulley’s words, “a rhetorical ploy that is historically inaccurate.” Black believers can hold the conviction “in their full Black selves,” and many have done so for generations.
Why Does the Slogan Land?
The wound behind it is real, and McCaulley does not wave it away. “The church is complicit in allowing the co-option of its message to do that work,” he says of the Bible’s use to justify oppression. He names an experience many Black believers know: “to be a Christian in America means to consistently be deeply disappointed with other Christians.” People did use Paul’s words against enslaved Africans and their descendants. The slogan offers a clean explanation for that pain and a clean cure: remove the texts that did the harm.
McCaulley doubts the diagnosis. White supremacy persists where these texts shape no one’s imagination. Empires use religion as a tool of oppression when it is handy and other tools when it is not. If that is right, the root problem is human sinfulness and the hunger for power, and deleting Romans would remove neither.
The slogan also borrows a stereotype about tone: “people tend to say Jesus is nice, Paul is mean.” McCaulley explains the difference by audience. Jesus spoke to Jewish hearers who at least claimed to follow the law of Moses, so he could build on shared ground. Paul spoke mostly to Gentiles, and “Paul can’t begin with the ethical basis of Judaism and build from there.” He had to state outright what Jesus’s hearers already assumed, and that makes him sound sharper.
The Gospels are not the gentle refuge the slogan imagines. “Jesus is the one who goes beyond actions to intent,” McCaulley notes, and the Sermon on the Mount bears him out:
“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)
Paul forbids the act. Jesus reaches into the desire. A reader hoping for a looser ethic by keeping Jesus and dropping Paul has read neither closely.
What Did the Slaveholders Actually Do With Paul?
Here the strongest objection must be faced. Paul’s letters do tell slaves to obey their masters, and McCaulley refuses to argue around that: “To say they don’t exist in the Bible would be, like, an unserious argument.”
His point concerns how those verses were used. “The slave masters wanted to use the Bible as the ceiling and not the floor.” They treated the household instructions as the most Scripture could ever require of them, and they brought assumptions the text did not contain: the so-called curse of Ham, scientific and social theories of racial hierarchy and open contempt. Abolitionists kept asking why, if these readings were sound, Black people could not enslave white people. The answer they received was that Black people were inferior. McCaulley’s conclusion: “undergirding all of this stuff was an exegesis that had nothing to do with the Bible.”
Fields asked whether slave owners even believed their own readings, or whether “they were looking for tools to manipulate.” McCaulley’s answer points to money. Colonial labor first relied on indentured white servants who worked a set term and then joined society. Planters came to prefer a workforce that could never integrate and whose children inherited their status. Later, as cotton became the South’s economic engine, defenders recast slavery from an unfortunate necessity into a positive good, because people were making money from it. American slavery, he argues, “is as much attributable to greed as anything.” That is his historical case, and it serves a larger point. The slaveholders were not neutral readers reluctantly obeying Paul. They had already decided, and Paul was their cover.
How Did Black Abolitionists Read the Same Bible?
If the slaveholders made Paul the ceiling, the abolitionists McCaulley studies read the whole canon and let it weigh together.
- The love command. If you were enslaved, you would want freedom, so loving your neighbor as yourself meant setting the enslaved free. One abolitionist turned to Matthew 25, where Jesus identifies with the hungry, the stranger, the sick and the imprisoned: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matthew 25:40). An enslaved person fit every one of those descriptions.
- The prophets. They condemn stolen wages and call for the breaking of bonds.
- The Torah. One law freed a slave whose master knocked out an eye or a tooth (Exodus 21:26–27). Another forbade returning a runaway: “Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee” (Deuteronomy 23:15). Abolitionists set that verse against America’s fugitive slave laws. They also cited the law against kidnapping: “And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death” (Exodus 21:16). Every Black person in America, they concluded, had been kidnapped.
- The Exodus. God sees enslaved people and frees them.
- Paul himself. “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” (Galatians 3:28).
McCaulley adds that whether ancient Israel actually practiced these laws is a separate question. The abolitionists were arguing from what the text says.
He also corrects a common description of their method. It is often framed as the spirit of the text against its letter. He says they did something more disciplined: they gathered the whole witness and asked which way it pointed when the choice was enslavement or freedom. They also weighed circumstances. McCaulley grants that Paul does not call for abolition. But the first Christians were a tiny, powerless minority under a monarchy, while Christians in the abolitionists’ day controlled churches, businesses and governments. Treating Paul’s instructions to a powerless church as the most God could ask of a powerful one misread him.
Frederick Douglass faced exactly the choice the slogan offers. Seeing the Bible used to defend slavery, he refused to throw it away. He held it closer and showed from its pages that God sides with freedom. These readers kept Paul and read him inside the whole book.
What Does It Cost to Set the Letters Aside?
The first cost is historical. McCaulley notes that a segment of the Black community now argues, in effect, that “the slave masters were the better readers of the Bible, and our ancestors were foolish.” Dropping Paul because enslavers quoted him concedes their central claim, that their reading of Paul was correct. The abolitionists denied exactly that. Setting the letters aside does not honor those ancestors. It overrules them.
The second cost is the book itself. Enslavers feared the Bible: “that’s the reason they didn’t want the enslaved people to read this book.” They edited it and preached only selected passages. A harmless text would not need guarding. McCaulley calls it “a tool that actually inspires revolutions.” A trimmed Bible throws away the resources Black Christians used to resist, Galatians 3:28 among them.
The third cost is authority. “There’s a long history of people editing the Bible to suit their own needs, and that has not always ended well,” McCaulley warns. The slaveholders were editors too. Once a reader decides which inspired writings bind them, the final authority sits inside the reader. McCaulley argues that a God who created us gets to define human flourishing, and that we are often overconfident in judging God’s will by our own opinion.
The slogan’s other targets work the same way. On women in ministry, McCaulley argues there is a strong case that Paul expected men and women to work together in preaching and teaching. Faithful Christians with a high view of Scripture land on different sides of that question, and the Jude 3 Project takes no house position on it. Either way, the debate happens by reading Paul closely, not by setting him aside. On sexuality, McCaulley argues that Christian ethics draw on the whole canon, from the Torah and the Psalms to the prophets, the Gospels and the letters. They do not rest on a few Pauline verses that could be removed without loss.
What Changes When the Slogan Is Seen Clearly?
The real choice is whether the God who spoke through the Gospels also spoke through the letters. That question can be argued on evidence and in good faith. Treating it as settled by a catchy line is neither.
McCaulley does not claim the hard texts stop being hard. He had questions about them himself. What he found over time was a balance: “the things that gave me comfort were way greater than the things that gave me pause.” In these texts he learned to see “a God who is a friend and not an enemy,” and he believes that way of seeing has to be taught. The slogan teaches the opposite, that the Bible’s most Pauline pages belong to the enemy. The Black Christians who read those pages in chains and found freedom there judged otherwise. Anyone drawn to the slogan owes their reasons a hearing first.