No contemporary evangelical scholar is better equipped than England’s F. F. Bruce to refute the proposition, advanced by liberal higher critics, that the theology of Paul represented a departure from that of Jesus. The Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis at the University of Manchester admits differences in form between the messages of Jesus and Paul, crediting the dissimilarities to different perspectives. But, after Bruce delineates Paul’s gospel (distinguishing between those elements Paul received from God directly and those received from Christian tradition), he demonstrates that the ways of salvation to which Paul and Jesus pointed were identical in essence. Especially when discussing ethical matters, Paul was frequently dependent on Christ’s very words. Bruce concludes by tying Paul’s concept of the Lordship of Jesus to both Old Testament
wisdom
and the earliest Christian confessions.