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Paul and His Arabian Dream
"...it is...a fact of history that
"The conversion of Paul was no conversion at all:
it was Paul who converted the religion that has raised one man above sin and
death into a religion that delivered millions of men so completely into their
dominion that their own common nature became a horror to them, and the
religious life became a denial of life." I don’t care much for Paul of Tarsus. I simply find his personality somewhat repugnant. I believe he was vain, boastful, homophobic, and sexist – not to mention totally ignorant of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth for whom he claimed to speak. Almost without exception, if you read any words that denigrate the equality of women in the New Testament, they come from the pen of Paul. If you read any words that pass judgment and condemnation on gays in the New Testament, they come from the pen of Paul. If you read any words that seem to condemn normal human sexual activity in the New Testament, they come from the pen of Paul. To me, the man just seems to be miserable. In I Corinthians 7:9, Paul sums up his anti-sex stand by placing marriage with its sexual activity as a fate worse than any other except burning in hell eternally. After a discourse discouraging marriage, he reluctantly concedes that “… it is better to marry than to burn.” This man had some real psychological issues and was in desperate need of some serious couch time with a qualified therapist. Since his interpretation of the Christian faith would prevail, he injected into that faith a sick, perverse view of human sexuality that has reaped a harvest of misery and sexual dysfunction – a faith that makes heroes of people who embrace celibacy and condemns young people as vile sinners guilty of mortal sin who practice the perfectly normal act of masturbation. The damage Paul did with his pen in the area of human sexual relationships in inestimable. The guilt driven aberrant sexual behavior frequently found in the “Christian” faith (i.e. Catholic priests and child abuse) can often be traced to a frustrated libido and a self hatred brought about solely by the pen of Paul of Tarsus. I personally strongly suspect that he was gay himself and refused to accept his sexual orientation. After all, he surrounded himself with young men like Timothy, Titus, and John Mark. His condemnation of gays is very reminiscent of the televangelists of today who preach so fervently against pornography and illicit sex, only to be scandalized by that very behavior later in their careers. The list of such modern preachers is long and growing. Regarding Paul and his horrible verbal gay bashing, the phrase in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet comes to mind, Paul, “…protests too much, methinks.”
When the character Paul is first mentioned in the New Testament, his name is Saul of Tarsus. Tarsus was (and is) a major city in what is now Turkey. In the time of Jesus, it was a major crossroads for Oriental trading caravans. Therefore it was a very cosmopolitan city with much diversification. This might explain why Paul was intensely interested in and knowledgeable of the major religious philosophies of the day. He no doubt had ample opportunity to discuss religious philosophy with world travelers from distant lands. From a reading of Acts it is clear that Paul enjoyed debate, and he was very good at it. His knowledge of Mithraism may very well have played a major role in the way he manipulated the simple teachings of Jesus from a Jewish revival sect into a separate world religion that did not reflect the original teachings of the alleged founder. The sad truth is that Christianity would eventually evolve into the very ritualistic mental prison that Jesus hated so fiercely. Simon Peter, the simple fisherman and devoted student of Jesus, would be utterly lost in the High Mass of the Pope in the Vatican square named in Peter’s memory. Tarsus is also remembered as the city where Cleopatra and Mark Anthony had their torrid affair.
Paul claimed to be an educated man. In Acts 22:3 he said that he was educated by Gamaliel the Elder, a respected Jewish Rabbi and member of the ruling Sanhedrin Council in Jerusalem. At least one prominent New Testament scholar, the German Helmet Koester, believed that Paul fudged on his academic history. He maintains that it is not likely that Paul who persecuted the early Christians with so much venom could have been taught by the tolerant Gamaliel who successfully argued against putting Simon Peter to death. (Acts 5:34 -39). Wherever Paul received his education is irrelevant for he proved to be a very bright man, a gifted orator and a prolific writer with a tenacity that led him all over the known world preaching his new brand of Christianity. When Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 AD and the Jewish Apostles of Jesus divided and scattered, the largest Christian churches left in the world were the ones Paul founded. The Jewish interpretation of the teachings of Jesus by those who actually heard Jesus teach were soon eclipsed and ultimately destroyed by the teachings of Paul and his band of followers. The world was ripe for the spread of Paul’s version of Christianity.
Before Saul became Paul, he fiercely persecuted the new Jewish revival sect which did not yet have a common name. Followers were simply known as “the disciples of Jesus.” Saul was on the road to Damascus when he had a profound mystical experience. A bright light appeared in the road and a heavenly voice addressed him by name, asking him why he was persecuting Jesus. The details of this experience are somewhat murky. In Acts 9:7 we are told that the men who accompanied Paul on the road to Damascus stood speechless because they heard a voice but did not see anyone speaking, while Acts 22:9 says specifically that those present saw a light but did not hear the voice. I don’t know what actually occurred on that fateful day on the road to Damascus, but it forever changed the course of Paul’s life.
You would think that after such an incredible mystical experience in the presence of this bright light that identified itself as Jesus, Paul would immediately want to go the Jerusalem where all the Apostles still lived and learn from them firsthand all that he could about the message of Jesus. But not Paul. He went to places unknown in Arabia where he may have spent as long as three years. One can only speculate that during this time apart from other believers, Paul developed what would eventually be called Christianity. If you read the epistle, Galatians (chapter 1 verses 17-20) you will find Paul’s strange story of his early years after his Damascus Road conversion. After three years when he finally went to Jerusalem, where the original Apostles of Jesus were preaching a completely different message than anything Paul would ever preach, he makes a point of saying he only spent 15 days there and only saw Peter and James. So Paul’s total theological education from the original Apostles of Jesus was two weeks and one day, yet because he was such a prolific writer and brilliant orator he would become the chief spokesperson for a new world religion. He contributed more books, by far, to the New Testament than any other writer. Paul knew very well that his message was different from the message of the Apostles, and he often referred to his message as my gospel and he cursed anyone who preached any other!
Paul would forever cling to this tenacious stubbornness of doing things his way. For him it was his way or no way at all. His biographer Luke records that the Holy Spirit specifically forbade Paul from going to Asia and preaching (Acts 16:6), but if you will read Acts 19:10 you will see that Paul went to Asia anyway and preached everywhere there. His life is filled with confrontations and conflicts with the Apostles and when the Jerusalem church offered compromise, as likely as not, Paul seems to have ignored it.
Where did Paul come up with the idea of what would become Christianity? First, when you reduce Paul’s Christianity to its simplest form it becomes a religion that demands a human sacrifice (Jesus) to appease an angry, vengeful God. But when you reduce the message of Jesus to its simplest form it becomes a living faith that makes God a loving father who asks us to walk a path of love, mercy and compassion, treating others as you wish to be treated. How can it be that modern Christians are so willing to believe Paul’s idea that God was angry and demanded a human sacrifice to appease his vengeful wrath over our sins when Jesus himself said in Matthew 12:7 that God wanted mercy and not sacrifice?
Why do you follow the religion of Paul of Tarsus? What makes
Paul different? Why do you choose to follow a “revelation”
that Paul said he received? Why have you chosen to believe him
rather than Jesus? If you are going to believe what God told someone
else, rather than what God tells you personally, why don’t you accept
the “revelation” that Joseph Smith said that God gave him?
Why don’t you follow the “revelation” that Mohammed said
that God gave him? Why don’t you follow the
“revelation” that Buddha received? Why didn’t you
follow Jim Jones or David Koresh and their strange
“revelations?” You can never really be sure because you
don’t know for certain if God revealed anything to any of them because
you weren’t there. One thing is certain; the message of Matthew,
Mark, and Luke is drastically different from the message of Paul. God
does not expect you believe everybody who comes down the pike with a
“new revelation.” He can’t possibly expect you to be
that gullible. You may believe Paul, or Mohammed, or Buddha, or Lao Tzu,
or whoever the next charismatic leader if you choose, but God most certainly
does not demand it of you! At the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, the Christianity developed by Paul of Tarsus became the “official version” of Christianity and the original teachings of Jesus of Nazareth would be largely ignored from that point on. Failure to believe the decrees of this council could result in death. At the Council of Nicaea, the simple carpenter/rabbi Jesus of Nazareth became Almighty God once and for all – the second person of a Holy Trinity. And at the Council of Ephesus in 431 his mother Mary was declared “the Mother of God.” When Constantine made Christianity the official state religion in 312 AD, the new religion took the offensive with a vengeance. During the next 100 years, Constantine would kill more Christians who disagreed with the new “orthodoxy” than the entire Roman Empire had killed during the first 100 years of the church when Christians were burned and thrown to the lions. That is the natural course for fundamentalist Book Religion of any kind – division, power, hatred, and finally bloodshed. When Jesus told people they should love and bless their enemies (Matthew 5:44), one thing is certain, he did not mean for them to kill their enemies, but that is exactly what people of every book religion on earth have done repeatedly. Quotes From Others
on Paul’s Influence on Christianity (From R. Craig Hogan Website: Yeshua before 30CE) In Christ or Paul?, by Rev. V.A. Holmes-Gore: "Let the reader contrast the true Christian standard with that of Paul and he will see the terrible betrayal of all that the Master taught. . . . For the surest way to betray a great Teacher is to misrepresent his message. . . . That is what Paul and his followers did, and because the Church has followed Paul in his error it has failed lamentably to redeem the world. . . . The teachings given by the blessed Master Christ, which the disciples John and Peter and James, the brother of the Master, tried in vain to defend and preserve intact were as utterly opposed to the Pauline Gospel as the light is opposed to the darkness."
Soren Kierkegaard, in The Journals: "In the teachings of Christ, religion is completely present tense: Jesus is the prototype and our task is to imitate him, become a disciple. But then through Paul came a basic alteration. Paul draws attention away from imitating Christ and fixes attention on the death of Christ The Atoner. What Martin Luther. in his reformation, failed to realize is that even before Catholicism, Christianity had become degenerate at the hands of Paul. Paul made Christianity the religion of Paul, not of Christ. Paul threw the Christianity of Christ away, completely turning it upside down, making it just the opposite of the original proclamation of Christ"
Ernest Renan, in his book Saint Paul: "True Christianity, which will last forever, comes from the gospel words of Christ not from the epistles of Paul. The writings of Paul have been a danger and a hidden rock, the causes of the principal defects of Christian theology."
Will Durant, in his Caesar and Christ: "Paul created a theology of which none but the vaguest warrants can be found in the words of Christ. . . . Through these interpretations Paul could neglect the actual life and sayings of Jesus, which he had not directly known. . . . Paul replaced conduct with creed as the test of virtue. It was a tragic change."
Robert Frost, winner of the Pulitzer prize for poetry in 1924,1931,1937 and 1943, in his "A Masque of Mercy": "Paul he's in the Bible too. He is the fellow who theologized Christ almost out of Christianity. Look out for him."
James Baldwin, the most noted black American author of this century, in his book The Fire Next Time: "The real architect of the Christian church was not the disreputable, sunbaked Hebrew (Jesus Christ) who gave it its name but rather the mercilessly fanatical and self-righteous Paul."
Martin Buber, the most respected Jewish philosopher of this century, in Two Types of Faith: "The Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount is completely opposed to Paul."
The famous mystic, poet and author, Kahlil Gibran, in Jesus the Son of Man: "This Paul is indeed a strange man. His soul is not the soul of a free man. He speaks not of Jesus nor does he repeat His Words. He would strike with his own hammer upon the anvil in the Name of One whom he does not know."
The famous theologian, Helmut Koester, in his The Theological Aspects of Primitive Christian Heresy: "Paul himself stands in the twilight zone of heresy. In reading Paul, one immediately encounters a major difficulty. Whatever Jesus had preached did not become the content of the missionary proclamation of Paul. . . . Sayings of Jesus do not play a role in Paul 's understanding of the event of salvation. . . . Paul did not care at all what Jesus had said. . . . Had Paul been completely successful very little of the sayings of Jesus would have survived."
Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States and author of the Declaration of Independence in his "Letter to William Short": "Paul was the first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus."
Renowned English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, in his Not Paul But Jesus: "It rests with every professor of the religion of Jesus to settle within himself to which of the two religions, that of Jesus or that of Paul, he will adhere."
The eminent theologian Ferdinand Christian Baur, in his Church History of the First Three Centuries: "What kind of authority can there be for an 'apostle' who, unlike the other apostles, had never been prepared for the apostolic office in Jesus' own school but had only later dared to claim the apostolic office on the basis on his own authority? The only question comes to be how the apostle Paul appears in his Epistles to be so indifferent to the historical facts of the life of Jesus. . . . He bears himself but little like a disciple who has received the doctrines and the principles which he preaches from the Master whose name he bears."
The great Mahatma Gandhi, the prophet of nonviolence who won freedom from England for India in an essay titled "Discussion on Fellowship": "I draw a great distinction between the Sermon on the Mount of Jesus and the Letters of Paul. Paul's Letters are a graft on Christ's teachings, Paul's own gloss apart from Christ's own experience."
Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist, in his essay "A Psychological Approach to Dogma": "Saul's [Paul's name before his conversion] fanatical resistance to Christianity. . . . was never entirely overcome. It is frankly disappointing to see how Paul hardly ever allows the real Jesus of Nazareth to get a word in."
George Bernard Shaw, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925; in his Androcles and the Lion: "There is not one word of Pauline Christianity in the
characteristic utterances of Jesus. . . . There has really never been a more
monstrous imposition perpetrated than the imposition of Paul's soul upon the
soul of Jesus. . . . It is now easy to understand how the Christianity of
Jesus. . . . was suppressed by the police and the
Church, while Paulinism overran the whole western
civilized world, which was at that time the
Albert Schweitzer, winner of the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize, called "one of the greatest Christians of his time," philosopher, physician, musician, clergyman, missionary, and theologian in his The Quest for the Historical Jesus and his Mysticism of Paul: "Paul. . . . did not desire to know Christ. . . . Paul shows us with what complete indifference the earthly life of Jesus was regarded. . . . What is the significance for our faith and for our religious life, the fact that the Gospel of Paul is different from the Gospel of Jesus?. . . . The attitude which Paul himself takes up towards the Gospel of Jesus is that he does not repeat it in the words of Jesus, and does not appeal to its authority. . . . The fateful thing is that the Greek, the Catholic, and the Protestant theologies all contain the Gospel of Paul in a form which does not continue the Gospel of Jesus, but displaces it."
William Wrede, in his excellent book, Paul: "The oblivious contradictions in the three accounts given by Paul in regard to his conversion are enough to arouse distrust. . . . The moral majesty of Jesus, his purity and piety, his ministry among his people, his manner as a prophet, the whole concrete ethical-religious content of his earthly life, signifies for Paul's Christology nothing whatever. . . . The name 'disciple of Jesus' has little applicability to Paul. . . . Jesus or Paul: this alternative characterizes, at least in part, the religious and theological warfare of the present day"
Rudolf Bultman, one of the most respected theologians of this century, in his Significance of the Historical Jesus for the Theology of Paul: "It is most obvious that Paul does not appeal to the words of the Lord in support of his. . . . views. when the essentially Pauline conceptions are considered, it is clear that Paul is not dependent on Jesus. Jesus' teaching is -- to all intents and purposes -- irrelevant for Paul."
Walter Bauer, another eminent theologian, in his Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity: "If one may be allowed to speak rather pointedly the Apostle Paul was the only Arch-Heretic known to the apostolic age."
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