Why did the gifted men in the early church have to teach Pauline doctrine instead of Old Testament teaching?
The early churches had no written New Testament, and the Gospels and Paul’s letters had not yet been published as Scripture. Since they could not rely on the completed written Word, gifted men had to proclaim Pauline doctrine directly; teaching the Old Testament instead would have produced confusion, or pandemonium, among believers.
Les teaches that when Paul wrote to the Corinthians, the New Testament was not yet written. The Gospels had not been written, and Paul’s own letters had not yet gone out as the Word of God. So these early, primitive, apostolic churches were growing in the pagan world without the written Word. They had to depend on gifted men. Those men had to be gifted to teach people the Pauline doctrines, not the teaching still coming out of the Old Testament; otherwise there would have been pandemonium. Paul, by inspiration, knew the local church’s most important need was men who could proclaim God’s truth without it being in print. Les also notes that the gift later faded away because now we have the printed page, so such men are no longer needed in that same way.