Is there a difference between Peter’s gospel and Paul’s?

Question 60098.

Peter’s gospel and Paul’s gospel are treated by some teachers as two different messages, with the consequence that only Paul’s letters, and in the more extreme versions only his prison epistles, apply to the church today. The position is usually called ultra-dispensationalism or hyper-dispensationalism, and it needs answering carefully because it grows out of a framework I largely share.

I am a dispensationalist. I hold that Israel and the church are distinct, that the Bible must be read according to its plain sense, and that God has administered His purposes differently in different periods. And I am persuaded that the division between Peter’s gospel and Paul’s gospel, as ultra-dispensationalism draws it, cannot be sustained from the text.

What Is Genuinely Different About Peter’s Gospel

Let me start by conceding what is true, because there are real differences and pretending otherwise helps nobody. Peter’s commission was primarily to the circumcised and Paul’s to the Gentiles, and Galatians 2 says so explicitly. Their audiences differed, and so did their starting points.

Their emphases differed too. Peter’s gospel, as preached in Acts 2 and 3, argues from the Old Testament to a Jewish audience that the Jesus they crucified is the promised Messiah, and calls for repentance and baptism. Paul, standing on the Areopagus, begins with an unknown god and a Creator who commands all people everywhere to repent.

Paul also received revelation Peter did not have, particularly concerning the church as a body in which Jew and Gentile are made one, which he calls a mystery hidden in previous ages. Recognising that is basic to dispensationalism. What none of it establishes is a difference in the message of salvation.

What Is Emphatically the Same

Put the content of Peter’s gospel and Paul’s side by side and the case for two gospels evaporates. Peter tells the household of Cornelius that everyone who believes in Jesus receives forgiveness of sins through His name. He tells the Jerusalem council in Acts 15:11 that we believe we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.

That last sentence is worth sitting with. Peter is saying that Jewish believers are saved in exactly the same way as Gentiles, by grace through faith. If Peter’s gospel were a different gospel of works and kingdom, this is the moment he would have said so, in front of the whole assembly, and he says the opposite.

Paul returns the compliment. In 1 Corinthians 15 he lists the resurrection appearances, names Peter first, and says in verse eleven that whether it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed. One message, several messengers. The Greek word for the message, euangelion, is used by both without qualification.

Galatians Settles It

The strongest evidence comes from Paul himself, and it is decisive. In Galatians 1:8-9 he pronounces a curse on anyone, including an angel from heaven, who preaches a gospel contrary to the one he preached. He says it twice, which is not a man leaving room for a parallel message.

Then in Galatians 2 he describes going up to Jerusalem, setting his gospel before the leaders, and receiving from James, Peter and John the right hand of fellowship. They added nothing to him. If Peter’s gospel had been a different message, that meeting would have produced two churches rather than a handshake.

Paul does rebuke Peter later in the same chapter, and it is worth noticing what the rebuke is about. Peter had withdrawn from eating with Gentiles, and Paul says his conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel. The gospel, singular, is the standard by which Peter is measured.

Where Ultra-Dispensationalism Goes Wrong

The system usually begins with a legitimate observation and pushes it past what it will bear. Yes, the church is distinct from Israel. Yes, there is a transition in Acts. Yes, Paul was given distinctive revelation. From that it concludes that the church began at Acts 9, or Acts 13, or Acts 28, and that everything before the chosen point belongs to a Jewish programme.

The evidence goes the other way. Peter, at Pentecost, explains what has happened by quoting Joel and speaking of the promise being for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to Himself. And in Acts 11 Peter tells the Jerusalem church that when the Spirit fell on Cornelius he remembered the word of the Lord about being baptised with the Holy Spirit, saying that God gave them the same gift as He gave us at the beginning.

The beginning, on Peter’s own testimony, was Pentecost. That is where the church starts, and one Spirit-baptism has been joining believers into one body ever since. See dispensational and covenant theology compared.

The Practical Damage

This is not a harmless curiosity, and I have seen the results. Churches shaped by the sharp division between Peter’s gospel and Paul’s tend to shrink their functional canon to a handful of letters. The Gospels become historical background. James is filed as Jewish. The Sermon on the Mount is postponed to a future kingdom and quietly ignored.

Some go further and drop water baptism and the Lord’s Supper as belonging to a superseded programme. When a system removes two ordinances that Jesus explicitly instituted, the system is the problem rather than the ordinances.

There is a spiritual cost as well as a doctrinal one. A believer who has been taught that most of his Bible is not addressed to him is being starved, and he usually does not know why he is hungry.

Keeping the Good Without the Error

None of this requires abandoning dispensational reading. The distinction between Israel and the church stands, the literal interpretation of prophecy stands, and the recognition of different administrations in God’s dealings stands. What has to go is the manufacturing of two ways of salvation out of one.

Charles Ryrie put the boundary well when he identified the essentials of the system as the distinction between Israel and the church, consistent literal interpretation, and the glory of God as the unifying purpose. Nothing in that list requires a second gospel.

So I read the whole New Testament as addressed to the church, while paying attention to whom each passage was first written and where it sits in the flow of God’s programme. That is ordinary careful reading, and it does not need a scalpel. See what is dispensational interpretation and the gospel in its simplest form.

How to Talk to Someone Who Holds It

Gently, would be my advice. People arrive at this position by taking Scripture seriously, which is more than can be said for many errors, and they are often well read within their own literature. Mockery will simply confirm their sense of being a persecuted remnant.

I would go to Acts 15:11 and Galatians 2:9 and ask what those verses mean on their reading. Both are short, both are unambiguous, and both come from the very apostles the system separates. Let the texts do the work.

And I would ask what they do with the Lord’s Supper, because that is often the point where the system’s practical consequences become uncomfortable for someone who loves Jesus.

Acts 10 and the Turning Point

If you want a single chapter that settles this question, take Acts 10. Peter is on a roof in Joppa, given a vision, and sent to the house of a Roman centurion. What he preaches there is worth reading slowly, because it is Peter’s gospel delivered to Gentiles before Paul’s ministry had properly begun.

He speaks of Jesus of Nazareth anointed with the Holy Spirit, going about doing good, put to death on a tree, raised by God on the third day, appointed judge of the living and the dead. Then the summary: to him all the prophets bear witness that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.

Everyone who believes. Forgiveness through his name. That is the message Paul preaches in Antioch three chapters later in almost identical terms. If two gospels existed, this is the chapter where the difference would be visible, and instead the two converge exactly. See Acts 10:43.

What Peter Says About Paul

The last word on this belongs to Peter himself, and it comes at the end of his second letter. He speaks of our beloved brother Paul, says that Paul wrote to them according to the wisdom given him, and refers to Paul’s letters as containing some things hard to understand which the ignorant twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.

Three things follow from that sentence. Peter had read Paul. Peter regarded Paul’s letters as Scripture. And Peter was aware that people were already misusing them, which is a strikingly relevant observation for the present discussion.

There is no hint of two programmes, two messages or two churches. There is an older apostle commending a younger one and warning that his letters can be twisted. Any system that sets Peter’s gospel against Paul’s has to explain why Peter apparently never noticed. See 2 Peter 3:15-16.

So, now what?

If this teaching has reached your church or your family, read Acts 10, Acts 15 and Galatians 1 and 2 in one sitting and see whether the division survives. In my judgement it does not, and the apostles themselves are the witnesses against it.

And take the wider lesson. A good framework applied too rigidly can cut a Bible into pieces, and the test of any system is whether it lets you sit under the whole of Scripture or only the parts it has approved. Which parts of your Bible have you quietly stopped reading, and why?

But we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.

Acts 15:11 (ESV)