On Accusations of Disagreement Between the Authors of the New Testament

 Those who believe that Jesus, Paul, John, and Peter disagreed with one another don't understand any of them. Those who believe Paul and James disagreed with one another understand neither. Just because someone uses a different set of semantics doesn't mean they're saying different things. Even in the Book of Acts, and in Paul's own writings, it was said that Paul, Peter, James, and the rest of the Apostles were in agreement, and that the twelve had nothing to add or take away from Paul's Gospel.
     Before a person accuses them of schism or disagreement (something which Paul was particular in writing against), they need to really understand what these men were saying and teaching. They need to step outside of their theological boxes and modern worldviews and step back into the multilingual and multicultural society of the ancient eastern Mediterranean. They need to forget about the Ecumenical Councils, the Reformation, and everything that happened after the first century and take these men where they were at, in the time and place they were at, and in the culture, society, and worldview they lived in.
     Yes, Jesus Christ was and remains the Son of God, but He was also, humanly speaking, a product of the society in which He was raised just as much as James and Peter were. Yes, Paul was ethnically Judaean (at least in part if not the whole), but he was also a cultural Roman writing to other cultural Romans. And no, they were not speaking English when they taught and wrote, neither Elizabethan English nor modern, which means if you really want to know what they were saying, you have to learn their language and cultural worldview.
     Paul was no more a misogynist than anyone of his time period, for example, but you have to understand the position of women in Roman or even Judaean culture to understand that what he wrote was well within the societal norms (norms which do not exist in modern Western Society). It was even progressive in some respects for the time and place, and it was meant to keep those he was writing to safe if anything. Would Paul write the same things today about the role of women had he been a product of the late 20th and early 21st centuries? No, of course not, because the societal expectations and the laws are different. The same is true when he writes about slaves and their owners. He isn't advocating for or against slavery, he's not making any judgments about it at all, instead, he's working within the society that existed at the time and trying to teach how to be a disciple of Jesus Christ under any conditions one might find themselves.
     Finally, sometimes people remember the same events or lectures differently. With twelve different people, you're likely to get twelve slightly different versions of what happened, or twelve differently worded versions of what was taught depending on how the individual person understood it. Recently, I've heard the same events retold by the people who lived them (regarding the CIA's Project Stargate). Every time it's just a little bit different. Someone forgets something. Someone mixes up a date. Someone says one person was present while another person says it was a different guy. Even the same guy will retell the story he previously told just a little bit differently every time. The core details of the stories they remember are the same, but all of these men are trying to recall events from thirty and forty years ago, and are working with memories affected by age. Not everyone has a photographic memory. We see the same thing in the writings of the Gospels and the New Testament in general. We see the same stories told slightly differently each time by different eyewitnesses. That's okay. It only lends credibility to their authenticity. Were they word for word identical, you'd know someone was making it up. As it stands, they ring true as recollections of people who were there.