The Men Who Shook His Hand
"Paul was a false apostle, and the real apostles knew it."
You'll hear that line in comment threads and long videos, and it's usually said with conviction. The people saying it often love the words of Jesus and are tired of watching them get explained away. The opposite mistake, treating Paul as if he outranks Jesus, is its own problem, and it gets its own answer in Does Paul Outrank Jesus? But the case against Paul runs like this. He admits he didn't check his gospel with anyone. The apostles in Jerusalem kept their distance. And when Jesus praised the church at Ephesus for testing those who say they are apostles and are not (Revelation 2:2), He meant Paul.
So let's check those claims against the record.
What Paul Says About Going It Alone
The case starts with Paul's own words. Describing the years right after Jesus met him on the Damascus road, he writes:
I did not immediately confer with flesh and blood, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me; but I went to Arabia, and returned again to Damascus. (Galatians 1:16-17)
Read by itself, that sounds like a man dodging accountability. So why would Paul tell the Galatians he stayed away from Jerusalem? Here's why. The teachers troubling Galatia seem to have been saying Paul's gospel was secondhand, picked up from the real leaders and watered down. Jerusalem was the headquarters. If you wanted to be anybody in the early church, you started there. Paul's answer is that his gospel didn't come from a committee: For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came through the revelation of Jesus Christ (Galatians 1:12).
Then he keeps going. This is the same letter the case against Paul quotes, and the next lines are the ones it leaves out. Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, and remained with him fifteen days. But I saw none of the other apostles except James, the Lord's brother (Galatians 1:18-19). Fifteen days with Peter is a long conversation. Fourteen years later Paul went back and laid his gospel out privately to those who were of reputation, lest by any means I might run, or had run, in vain (Galatians 2:2). A man hiding his message from the apostles doesn't go to them twice.
Three Names in Galatians 2:9
Watch who sits across the table on that second visit.
And when James, Cephas, and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that had been given to me, they gave me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised. (Galatians 2:9)
James, Peter and John are the three apostles this argument trusts most, James above all, since his letter talks about works. And they're the three men who took Paul's hand. Paul says those who seemed to be something added nothing to me (Galatians 2:6). They heard him out, they recognized the grace of God on him, and the one thing they asked was that he remember the poor, the very thing which I also was eager to do (Galatians 2:10).
If the pillars of Jerusalem meant to expose a fraud, they picked a strange way to do it.
When Peter and Paul Bumped Heads
They did disagree, and in public. At Antioch, Peter had been eating with Gentile believers. Then men from James arrived, and Peter pulled away from the Gentiles' table, fearing those who were of the circumcision (Galatians 2:12). Paul withstood him to his face (Galatians 2:11).
Paul's charge is that Peter and the others were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel (Galatians 2:14). He isn't accusing Peter of preaching a different message. He's accusing him of stepping away from the one they both preached. Two apostles bumped heads over a dinner table, and the gospel was the standard each of them answered to.
Galatians is Paul's side of the story, so look at what Luke and Peter recorded. When the apostles and elders in Jerusalem wrote to the Gentile believers, after James gave his judgment, they sent the letter with our beloved Barnabas and Paul, men who have risked their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ (Acts 15:25-26). Years later Paul told James and the elders what God had done among the Gentiles, and when they heard it, they glorified the Lord (Acts 21:20).
Then Peter, the man Paul corrected in front of everyone, wrote about our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given to him. Peter admits some of Paul's writing is hard to understand, and he warns that untaught and unstable people twist it, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures (2 Peter 3:15-16). Peter puts Paul's letters on the same shelf as Scripture.
Some date 2 Peter to around AD 400, but that's roughly when the church finished debating its list of books, a different question from when the letter was written. Origen, who died around AD 253, knew the letter, and a papyrus copy of it called P72 survives from about AD 300.
The Wolves at Ephesus
That leaves Revelation 2. Jesus commends Ephesus for testing those who say they are apostles and are not. Ephesus, though, was Paul's church. He taught there for three years (Acts 20:31). Before he left the region, he called its elders to Miletus and warned them, after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock (Acts 20:29). Jesus doesn't name anyone in that letter, and the church He praised for testing apostles is the church Paul had trained to test them.
The phrase "false apostles" appears exactly once in the New Testament, and Paul is the one who wrote it (2 Corinthians 11:13). The man accused of being one spent his ministry warning churches about them.
Twelve Foundations
One more objection points to the twelve foundations of the New Jerusalem, bearing the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb (Revelation 21:14), with no thirteenth for Paul. Paul put himself outside the Twelve in his own words. He lists Cephas, then the Twelve, then James, then all the apostles, and then himself, last of all... as by one born out of due time (1 Corinthians 15:5-8). Barnabas is called an apostle (Acts 14:14), and so is James the Lord's brother (Galatians 1:19), and neither one belongs to the Twelve. By that logic James loses his place too, and he's the apostle this argument leans on most.
When the Bible sounds like it's arguing with itself, it's usually because it's been taught in pieces. Read Galatians 1 and 2 in one sitting and you'll watch the leaders in Jerusalem hear Paul out, recognize the grace on him, and send him to the Gentiles with their blessing. Paul closed his own list of resurrection witnesses by standing beside the others and naming the one message they all carried.
Therefore, whether it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed. (1 Corinthians 15:11)
