If there were a change in the substance of the gospel after Jesus’ death and resurrection such that obedience to his teaching was no longer integral to saving faith, then the New Testament would be describing not only two ethnic gospels but two temporal gospels: one preached by Jesus during his ministry and lived by his disciples, and another preached later by Paul to Gentiles. That possibility is excluded by the very way the early Christian movement understood itself.
Jesus did not present his teaching as provisional or temporary. He spoke of his words as enduring, authoritative, and determinative for final judgment. Those who heard him before the cross were not told that his demands would soon be relaxed, nor that the meaning of belief would later be redefined. When he said that abiding in his word marked true disciples and that remaining enslaved to sin meant dying in one’s sins, he was not offering an interim ethic to be replaced after Easter, but revealing what life under God’s reign looks like. His disciples did not abandon that understanding after the resurrection; they continued to see themselves as people living under his teaching, now illumined and empowered by the Spirit.
The resurrection, in the New Testament’s own presentation, does not overturn Jesus’ teaching but confirms and intensifies it. The risen Jesus commissions his followers to make disciples by teaching the nations to observe all that he commanded. That instruction explicitly bridges the “before” and “after”: what Jesus taught during his earthly ministry is what is to be taught and lived out in the post-resurrection mission. The gospel proclaimed after Easter therefore cannot nullify the call to abiding obedience without contradicting the risen Lord’s own commission.
Paul fits within this continuity. He does not claim to preach a new gospel adapted for a new era, but to proclaim the same Lord now revealed in glory. The change he announces is not a change in what faith means, but in how people are brought into that life: not through Torah, ethnicity, or boundary markers, but through union with the crucified and risen Christ and the gift of the Spirit. Those who had followed Jesus before the cross continued to follow him after it, and Gentiles who came to faith through Paul were called into the same pattern of life. There is no hint in Paul that earlier disciples were living under a stricter form of faith that later believers were spared.
Taken together, the New Testament presents a single, continuous gospel across time. From Jesus’ first call to follow him, through his death and resurrection, and into the Gentile mission, the basic shape remains the same: salvation is God’s gift, received through trusting allegiance to Jesus, and that allegiance is shown by abiding in his word, being freed from the mastery of sin, and walking in the life he teaches. To separate trust from obedience would not only divide Jew from Gentile, but would fracture the gospel itself into “before” and “after” versions—something the New Testament itself does not allow.
AI wording as prompted by Stephen D Green
