Hi all,
I wonder if you can help.
[1]Reading the NT and Jesus, overall, has very little to say in comparison to Paul. I understand Paul was a Jew who, persecuted Christians before becoming a follower of Christ, but did not know Jesus during his lifetime. Paul met Jesus, after he was resurrected, on the road to/from Emmaus.
Feel free to correct any of this that is incorrect.
[2a]What I can't understand is how Paul had such authority to a) seemingly become the leader of the disciples and taking ownership of their teachings to Jews/Gentiles b) authority/leadership of the church c) become the main reference within the NT
[3]My understanding is that he was relatively wealthy and could afford to write more than most because he was able to afford paper etc and was well educated in comparison to most of the population.
[2b]Where is the biblical reference giving Paul such authority or was it just accepted that it was his by his peers?
Any clarification on these points would be appreciated, thanks
Good morning
@CerebralCherub,
I added the numbering so I could track the points of comment and inquiry.
[1] Nearly everything contained in the gospels can be found in what we call the Old Testament, or what the Jews call Tanakh. Very little there is new. If we were Jews living in the first century Israel, we'd have all already been familiar with Jesus' source material,
but we would have considered what he was teaching to be new because what Jesus taught can be considered a
restored understanding of Tanakh, the
original meaning and intent of God's prior revelation. By the time the first century AD rolled around Judaism had departed from God in many ways, both theologically and practically. Judaism got the priesthood wrong, the monarchy wrong, the temple wrong, and it was rife with the poles of legalism and hypocrisy. All of that needed correction. Judaism needed an overhaul, not a "restoration." This was all foreknown by God and the fact the Jewish leaders (nor the commoner) understood that was simply roof of the fact. The time had come for the overhaul. The overhaul had been predicted (prophesied) but Judaism was so twisted and perverted that it had become blind - even when the prophesied Messiah stood right in front of them commanding the elements of creation, healing sickness, raising people from the grave, casting out demons speaking into the heart of a person, etc. Paul simply built on that. There'd be no Paul without it. Keep in mind we have a very small portion of what Jesus taught. He preached nearly daily for three years and, according to John, what he said would fill many books, not a dozen epistles.
[2a] Paul is very much like Moses. Moses was cast adrift by his mother in her hope for his survival. God saw fit to have the infant rescued by an Egyptian princess and nursed by a Jewish nursemaid..... who just happened to be the boy's mom. As a consequence, Moses learned both Egyptian and Jewish culture. He learned about monotheism and polytheism. He learned the arts of politics and warfare, which were realms of knowledge he would not have learned solely as a slave. By the time Moses is summoned into service Moses has also experienced longsuffering and poverty, the freedom of royalty, the destitution of his own guilt, the thirst of wandering in a wilderness, and the freedom of a shepherd. He is uniquely prepared for the task assigned him.
Paul is very similar. Born Saul, he was raised in the Greek city of Tarsus by a father who had Roman citizenship and a mother who was Jewish. Saul, therefore, enjoyed the privilege of citizenship and became familiar with both monotheism and polytheism, the Greco-Roman Gentile culture and the Jewish culture, which in his lifetime had largely succumbed to the intertestamental influences of Hellenism. He gets sent off to Jerusalem to have the finest education of his day under the greatest Jewish teacher of his day, Gamaliel. Saul does not simply learn Judaism because he is taught the sectarian viewpoints of the Pharisees, not the longer, more historical and orthodox views of the Sadducees. The Pharisees, along with the Essenes
(and the Zealots), developed during the intertestamental period, too. This is important because the Pharisees believed in life after death, a resurrection, whereas the Sads did not
(which is why they are so sad u cee 
). Like Moses was centuries earlier, this makes Saul uniquely prepared to serve God's purpose preaching the gospel to the diverse pagan cultures all the way to Caesar's courts
(an event that would have been nearly impossible for a non-citizen of the Roman Empire). Fundamentally, the only power and authority Paul has is that which is given to him by his Creator and that was forcefully demonstrated by knocking him of his donkey, striking him blind, and forcing him to submit to someone he would have persecuted and seen executed only moments earlier.
[2b] Paul's epistles are nothing more than the furtherance of divine revelation, a revelation to all humanity that began centuries earlier with the Pentateuch and the oral traditions that God had inspired to inform the written word. If all we had was the book of Genesis we'd understand very little, and the same can be said if all we had was the Pentateuch. The older revelation(s) informs the newer revelation, and the newer revelation explains the older. We should/would, therefore expect the epistolary to have much more explanatory power than anything and everything that preceded it, but without which there could be no epistolary. NONE of it would have been possible for Paul had he not been a Pharisees and not been purchased by God for God's purpose.
Ephesians 2:8-10
For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; 9not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. 10For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.
Paul had been created in Christ for works that God planned for him to perform before Paul was ever saved. That's the only authority Paul has, and he'd been prepared from his youth for those good works, for that very purpose. He was not simply a literate man in a day when most people were illiterate. He was a man literate in Greek and Roman culture, a man familiar with the Greek philosophers and the philosophies they asserted, with the rituals and customs of the pagan gods. He was uniquely prepared to speak to circumstances in adjacent societies/cultures the more insulated Jews could not.
Lastly, the documents we have that comprise our Bible are likely to be a small portion of all the correspondence that was written by the apostles (of which there were more than two dozen). We know, for example, that there are letters to the Church in Corinth that are missing because the Corinthians letters mention correspondence we don't have. God, in His wisdom, saw fit to preserve what (apparently) we needed and was sufficient for
His purposes.
