I called it “Every Paul needs a Jesus” rather than “Every Jesus needs a Paul”. My thesis is that Jesus had something in mind, and Paul (and some others; when I say “Paul” I’m being ambiguous about whether I mean Paul-the-person or Paul-the-collection-of-authors-who-wrote-the-books-ascribed-to-Paul) came along, took what Jesus had started, and built something else out of it. I don’t see Paul as faithfully continuing Jesus’ program. He might have meant to, but that wasn’t the result. Though the larger deviations from Jesus’ message, what we think of today as Christianity’s institutionalized hypocrisy (e.g., caring more about homosexuality than poverty or cruelty), came later, after Paul.
I called it “Every Paul needs a Jesus” rather than “Every Jesus needs a Paul”. My thesis is that Jesus had something in mind, and Paul (and some others; when I say “Paul” I’m being ambiguous about whether I mean Paul-the-person or Paul-the-collection-of-authors-who-wrote-the-books-ascribed-to-Paul) came along, took what Jesus had started, and built something else out of it. I don’t see Paul as faithfully continuing Jesus’ program. He might have meant to, but that wasn’t the result. Though the larger deviations from Jesus’ message, what we think of today as Christianity’s institutionalized hypocrisy (e.g., caring more about homosexuality than poverty or cruelty), came later, after Paul.