This paper argues that the Pauline school is the major influence lying behind the entire corpus of NT literature, including the Gospels, epistles, and the Apocalypse. It asserts that the NT did not come into being over the second through fourth centuries as the result of church leaders and councils picking and choosing which works to include or exclude from a “smorgasbord” of independently created sources, but that this literature was created and imposed authoritatively upon the church by Paul’s school.

This conclusion is fundamentally similar to that of David Trobisch, but presents a different body of evidence in support of it. Whereas Trobisch builds his argument primarily on the evidence of the extant families of manuscripts and their different readings, the evidence here is intra-textual, in that the entire New Testament literature revolves around revisiting “in many and various ways” (Heb 1:1) the thesis originally proposed by Paul in Galatians, in which he presents “the one unchanging gospel” (Gal 1:6-9). The paper further argues that Paul himself did not acknowledge other Christian leaders as having any independent authority for his churches—even in 1 Corinthians 15 where most scholars believe he did just that. There was always one and only one voice of authority in the Pauline church, and that single voice of authority continues to speak to the Christian church today through a single cohesive literary monument that we call the New Testament. That literary monument was created by Paul and his disciples, not by Jesus and his disciples.