He spent time in Bamberg, Nürnberg and Ansbach before becoming professor of exegesis and church history at the University of Heidelberg (1811–44), where he was instrumental in hiring Hegel in 1816.

[2] For example, Paulus' naturalistic exegesis of the narrative of Jesus walking on water is that περιπατῶν ἐπὶ τὴν θάλασσαν (Matthew 14:25) really means by the shore and not on the sea.

[1] He contends that since it was a dark stormy night and the disciples had trouble making headway in their boat, when Jesus appeared they only thought they were in the middle of the Sea of Galilee when in truth they were still in the shallows.

He is the first scholar to propose the "swoon theory" which speculates that Jesus did not actually die on the cross, but somehow survived his execution and proclaimed that he had risen from the dead.

[3] The rationalism espoused by Paulus went out of fashion during his lifetime and was replaced by David Strauss' view that held that scripture can be best characterized as mythology.