People are starved of the truth and are tired of hearing everyone around talk so much bullshit… If you don’t believe that truth exists then what you have is bullshit.

Prof Harry Frankfurt, author of On Bullshit

How Paul Invented Christianity 1

Paul was the greatest fantasist of all. He created the Christian myth by deifying Jesus.
Hyam Maccoby, The Mythmaker Paul and the Invention of Christianity

Paul in Person
Paul and Judaism
Paul and the Law

Abstract

Paul made the Jewish leader, Jesus, who expected God’s visitation to save the Jews from foreign oppression, into the saviour of an Hellenistic mystery cult. Paul was the cult leader. He transferred the divine title of God to the messiah, and substituted effort of will by faith. Faith is a cop out. It is empty without works, as James wrote, even in the New Testament. All modern Christians prefer faith because works means doing something—doing God’s will, actually measuring up to the law, or measuring up to the criterion of loving your enemy. Paul’s rejection of will undercut Jesus, Judaism and Zoroastrianism, because it is the effort involved in trying to do God’s will that is salvific. Trying to fulfil the law, and trying to love others is what takes people closer to God, not any self-indulgent faith. Paul distorted the value of the law, and he taught in opposition to Jesus. Jews stepped away and ignored him. The Christianity of Christ himself was destroyed.

Paul in Person

H Wrede and others have pointed out that Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus was of the psychological type in which belief already existed but had been fought against. The vision of the risen Jesus was the crisis that made the contradiction conscious. Having accepted the resurrection of the Jewish rebel, Paul had to rationalize his new and embarrassing belief. He did it by applying to him the solar and salvific epithets of the ancient redeemer gods. Jesus was a heavenly figure from the start for Paul. He had never known him alive, and knew little of his life or teaching in life, but it did not matter to him. His advent to change the world was what mattered to Paul. Above all, it was the expectation of his parousia, the return of the messiah with the hosts of heaven to purge and purify the world that Paul had in common with the early church, and that he was keen to propagate.

Paul is not an apostle of the historical Jesus, whose teachings are of no consequence, even though he is God. Paul knew little about the life of Jesus, or he was not willing to reveal what he did know to his hearers. He never met the living Jesus (1 Cor 9:1) and shows little trace in his letters of knowing the Palestinian traditions about Jesus (R Bultmann), but is committed only to the meaning to him of his visions. What he knew about Christ was that he was:

born as a Jew under the law (Gal 4:4)
descended from David (Rom 1:3)
betrayed (1 Cor 11:23)
crucified by the archons of the æon (Gal 1:3; 1 Cor 2:2; Phil 2:3)
buried and rose again (1 Cor 15:4; Rom 6:4)
prophesied—he was the messiah.

So, Paul put Jesus as a real man in history but made no use of anything that he taught. Albert Schweitzer wrote:

Where possible he avoids quoting the teaching of Jesus, in fact, even mentioning it. If we had to rely on Paul, we should not know that Jesus taught in parables, had delivered the Sermon on the Mount and had taught his disciples “Our Father”. Even where they are specially relevant, Paul passes over words of the Lord.

Paul passes over words of the Lord because:

The gospel which was preached by me is not man’s gospel, for I did not receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came from a revelation of Jesus Christ.
Gal 1:11-12

Paul’s claim to be an apostle rest on his visions of the risen Christ. Visions are, at best, dreams, and otherwise are far more serious such as hallucinations or delusions. If we take them literally, they are psychological phenomena related to Paul’s uncertain mental stability. Christians do not like to think of this because it is tantamount to accepting that mystical experiences are a sign of psychosis, and any such explanation would wipe out half the best scenes in the bible, and some favoured saints. All the divine voices in the bible would have an explanation that is less than flattering, and visions of talking burning bushes need not be thought of as signs from God but an entirely subjective symptom of neurosis or worse. Christians therefore stick to their hypothesis of God and thereby continue to follow the subjective ravings of madmen, or men on the verge of madness. Paul’s “thorn in the side” is much more likely to have been bipolar illness as it is euphemistically called these days, but which used to be better described as manic depression. He described it quite well himself when he explained it was a…

…messenger of Satan, to harass me, to keep me from being too elated.
2 Corinthians 12:7

When Paul got too elated or excited he was brought down again by his thorn. In other words he came down from a manic phase into a depressed phase, and had learned to live with it. Manic depressives are not unusually akin to geniuses. They can make a great deal of the immense drive and energy they get from their manic phase, and so can make an impact. At its best, the depression forces the manic depressive to rest every so often, but it can, of course, drive them to suicide. Their manic phase drives all their friends to suicide!

Arguably Paul is meant in some Talmudic passages like the Mishna attributed to Rabbi Eliezar of Modaim:

He who violates the sabbath, breaks fasts, and scandalizes his neighbour, annuls the covenant of our father Abraham, and twists the meaning of the law—even though he has knowledge of the law and can point to good works—will have no part in the world to come.

Elsewhere in the Talmud, Gehazi appears, a faithless servant of Elisha, of whom Rabbi Jochanan said:

Of Gehazi, it is said he was incapable of penance, because he sinned and led others astray into sinning. Moreover, Gehazi became leprous.

If Gehazi really were Paul, some scholars think the leprosy could have been Paul’s thorn in the side, but it is unlikely. Leprosy was a metaphor for precisely the sins that Gehazi committed, and this was the metaphorical leprosy that Jesus had cured. Lepers were teachers of false law. Actual leprosy would surely have stopped Gehazi or anyone else from effectively spreading any message, true or otherwise, to lead people astray. They would be confined most of the time to living in a leper colony, and forbidden to enter the city.

These doubtful allusions might mean Paul because of what we know of him from the New Testament. They therefore cannot add anything new to the New Testament information, particularly his own letters.

Paul openly rejected the gospel taught by Jesus to the twelve apostles chosen by him personally in his lifetime. Yet Christ is God, we are told. Paul was a man. Paul’s teaching of the risen Christ, in short, mysticism, has eclipsed the life and practical teaching of God incarnated on earth. Modern Christians put their emphasis on faith, and not on works, but it was Paul’s emphasis not that of God in the flesh of Jesus who several times made it clear that salvation was not so easy as simply faith. The Christians always had to do something. Doing something means works! Paul makes a fool of Christians by turning them away from the precepts taught by the very man they worship! Paul rejected the faith of Jesus to teach faith in Jesus! No doubt they are convinced it is the same thing, but that is the entire point. It is not! Since Jesus is God, according to Christians, but Paul is a mortal, a man who had the devil’s thorn in his side, the rejection of the faith of God, and of all God’s teaching seems a serious matter, but it never bothers Christians.

For Paul, God only appeared on earth so that he could die and rise again! Accordingly, Paul lists multiple cases of post-resurrection appearances, and Christians tell us that whatever is mutiply attested is true. But these, of course, are not multiple attestations. They are attestations by Paul, and only one of them is from Paul’s own experience, and only one other is separately attested. That is the alleged appearance to Peter, which Peter himself does not confirm. An appearance to Mary Magdalene is not confirmed by her. In the end, of the multiple attestation of the appearance of the formerly dead Christ, only that by Paul is confirmed by the one who actually experienced it. The rest are stories. In US legal jargon, they are “hear-say” and are inadmissable. Even Paul’s is, because no one is certain that the letters attributed to him were not written by someone else!

The only description of Paul is non-canonical. It is in the Acts of Paul and Thecla, a book the church thought was unsuitable for canonization, but the description of Paul in it effectively became canonical and influenced portraits of Paul throughout ecclesiastical history:

I saw Paul coming, a man of small stature with a big bold head and crooked legs but with a noble bearing, eyebrows grown together, and with a rather prominent nose, a man breathing friendliness.
Acta Pauli et Theclae

Paul and Judaism

Matthew 23:15 attests to Jewish missionary activity around the time of Jesus and Paul. All of Strabo, Seneca, Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus, Horace, Juvenal and Dio Cassius confirm it. Prophesies that a sign of the coming of the messiah was the nations turning to Judaism was the reason for Jewish missionaries. Its immediate aim was not to effect complete conversion, but to get gentiles as Godfearers, associate Jews who accepted a partial Torah called the law of Noah. Paul (Rom 9-10) was appealing directly to Godfearers converted by Jewish missionaries. In this period there were about 5 million Jews at least in a Roman empire with a population of about 70 million. Herod had built his magnificent temple and the port of Caesarea to take advantage of the vast number of Jews in the empire even in the first century BC. It was a big attraction to them as a Passover pilgrimage, and the pilgrims brought in a lot of money. The number of Jews was extraordinarily high for such a tiny country, and missionary activity is too late to explain it. There must have been a large diaspora even in the days of the Roman republic. Where had they all come from? The tiny country of Judaea could not have bred such a vast number of Jews.

The inescapable fact is that all of them could not have been descended from people who once lived in Judaea, and nor could that number of converts have been made in less than a century of proselytism. Jew simply cannot mean what everyone thinks it means. It is not someone from Judaea. It is a religious identity for those who worshipped Yehouah, and they must have been widespread in the ANE if they could not all have come a small part of the Palestinian hills. The gentile who fulfilled the whole of the law of Moses was a Jew. It is proof that Judaism is a religion and not a race. The Ebionites had the same rule:

The non-Jew who fulfils the law is a Jew. If he does not fulfil it, a Greek.
Hom 11:16

The truth is that Jerusalem was like Mecca and Rome for Islam and Catholicism respectively, and Judaea was like the Vatican city. It had been the center of the Jewish religion since around 400 BC when it was set up for that purpose by the Persian kings. The Jewish religion was the common religion of the people who had co-operated with the Persian kings. Whatever their religion had been, it was restored by Persian colonists, and Lo! it was restored as Judaism. Darius II gave them responsibility for the tiny temple state of Yehud and for collecting taxes from “the nations”. So Persian Jews lived all over the Persian empire even when Jerusalem was set up as the Jewish temple state. Judaism began as a diaspora! This, and not the capture of Samaria by the Assyrians is the origin of the legend of the lost tribes of Israel. By the time of Christ, the whole of the western Persian empire had been taken over by Rome, and its Jews too. Egypt, Anatolia and Syria were full of Jews. Carthage too had had many Jews when it fell in 146 BC, and they quickly spread elsewhere as tradesmen and merchants. There were always many more Jews in the east, in the Parthian empire, notably in Babylonia and Media, where they had their own ruler or minister, and Rome was never sure where Jewish loyalty lay. That is why Romans valued the loyalty of the Herod family of puppet kings, and could not tolerate any disloyal or rebel government in Judaea.

Some think it possible and even likely that Paul had already had experience as a missionary to the gentiles but as a preacher of Jewish circumcision. It might explain his eagerness and quick decision to do the job for the Jerusalem Church. Persuading gentiles to be circumcised was too unrewarding, and Paul determined it ought to be easier. His methods caused the unarguable difference that arose between him and the chosen apostles and their church in Jerusalem, but this was settled in his own favour, according to Paul, so long as he collected for The Poor (ebionim) of Jerusalem, and they accepted table fellowship with gentiles. The truth seems to be otherwise. Paul’s teaching about the law, soteriology and eschatology is incompatible with the teaching of Jesus we have in the synoptic gospels.

I was once alive apart from the law.
Romans 7:9

Paul could mean here that he was not always a Jew, or he once was a token Jew, like them, the Hellenized Jews among his listeners. Acts 21:40 says Paul spoke in Hebrew to his oppressors in Jerusalem but Aramaic is commonly meant when ancient books say people spoke Hebrew. It was a dead language in everyday life. His letters certainly have a strong whiff of Aramaic in them, so it is credible that he was brought up in an Aramaic speaking family and a Greek speaking world. Scholars, particularly Jewish ones, have argued that Paul once was himself a proselyte. Having converted, or returned to the fold if was merely lapsed, he developed a powerful missionary inclination. Alternatively, he might have been a “joiner”—one who joins various cults and sects until he finds one that suits him, or learns enough to start his own.

For a Jew, he is a theologian who is a master of the correct technical method of scriptural exegesis but in consequence of some perversity applies it so falsely that he arrives at nonsensical results.
V Grönbech

But many Jewish scholars cannot see this mastery of scriptural exegesis in the first place, certainly in rabbinic terms, but he could have been a master at Essenic style exegesis. Effectively, it allows the exegete to find whatever suits his purpose somewhere in the scriptures. Paul puts great emphasis on the Holy Spirit as the key to the divine mysteries. In this usage and terminology, Paul echoes the Qumran literature.

Paul and the Law

Essentially Paul’s claim is that the law ends when the æon of the law ends. The æon of the law followed the æon of chaos (tohu wa bohu), each of which lasted 2000 years and ended when the messiah heralded the final æon (IV Ezra 5:5; Barnabas 15:4). The age of the world was therefore 6000 years, a divine certainty that the Byzantines took from Julius Africanus Sextus, and which modern day creationists in the US still believe. All things of the law were fulfilled in the messiah. The trouble is that history has shown that Paul propelled us into an æon of tohu wa bohu again, and not any blissful messianic æon. We have only a few centuries ago started to emerge from the Christian induced darkness, though the potential for more chaos yet increases. The Christian æon has not been any sort of ideal, and only blind deaf and brainless Christians can think otherwise. Paul was therefore demonstrably wrong in his thought and teaching. Christ might have been the end of the law (Rom 10:4) but he did not bring in any kind of golden age.

Of course, the messianic end to the law was not only Paul’s view. Philo said so (Vita Adam 1:13; Vita Mosis 3:22), and the Rabbis thought so generally, although they thought the messiah would bring a new Torah suitable for an age in which “the evil impulse” had been destroyed. Apocalyptic writings also unite in the idea that the law ended with the messianic kingdom, though they do not say so explicitly. They never mention any law in the divine kingdom and do not describe it as the fulfilment of the law, according to Schweitzer.

Christians will claim that Paul’s substitution of love for the law is the new Torah, but where is the evidence in the last 2000 years that Christians, let alone ordinary sinners, have given up the evil impulse for love? That much later messianists like the Sabbatai made the same claim that the law ended with the arrival of their messiah shows they had noticed no intervening messianic age. Only Christians do, but it is always personal to them, and gives them the right, history proves, to oppress everyone else, often including other Christians actually trying to be righteous. Heretics and witches could be legally burned to death because they were Christians in the insane Christian mind set.

In Persian religion, the saviour was sent to prepare the way for the restoration of the perfection of creation when the world was descending again towards chaos. Jewish sages had then to contend with the law. What was its purpose if it did not stop the world being wicked, if it did not make people good? An alternative speculation had arisen that the law did just that, and the messiah arrived when the world was ready for the final step to original perfection. The final step was necessary because the law had made everyone so conscious of guilt that the messiah had to relieve them of it.

Thus the purpose of the law was simply as a measure of perfection, and righteous people got more and more conscious of the small differences in their behaviour from perfection as they got closer to it. In earlier times the sinfulnness of the impious was clear to everyone. Paradoxically, guilt increased the nearer perfect people were, falling short of the law even fractionally was angst-making. It sounds likely to have been Essenic, as the leading Essenes strived for perfection under the law, but still expected the archangel Michael to come with the hosts of heaven. One trouble with this speculation was that it led to the same reaction amongst some as the Gnostic Carpocratians. The law was impossible to meet so—in for a penny, in for a pound—just be unrepentant sinners.

Paul took the view that the law was a measure of sinfulness, it was “to increase trespass” (Rom 5:20; cf Gal 3:19)—to make people aware of their sins. The messiah came when sin was rife, at least to the extent that people realized it. For Paul, the age was wicked and the world was wicked and the law was the measure of it. Those who were most aware of their failing before the law were most plagued with guilt. Paul was one of these!

The form of death by crucifixion of the messiah is a torture introduced into the Roman empire from Persia. Traditionally it was hanging from a tree, not at all like modern hanging by the neck, a quick death if done properly, but a slow and agonizing death by deprivation of food and water, and exposure to sun, wind and rain, the humiliation of excreting and public ridicule, followed by being consumed, even while dying, by carion birds. The myth of carnivorous trees is most likely travellers’ sightings of trees reserved for public executions with bones hanging in them and scattered around. Hanging under the Jewish law was ignominous, an ignoble death as a punishment for ignoble acts.

In Deuteronomy, the hanged man, according to the Greek Septuagint, is “accursed by God”. Exegetes of the Hebrew disagree, saying it is a “cursing of God”, leaving it ambiguous whether God is cursing or cursed. The Ebionites read it this way, according to Jerome (ad Gal 3:14), as does the Talmud. It seems superfluous to say that a hanged man is cursed by God, so the reading that any such punishment is an offence to God is the correct one. Anyway, Paul thought it offensive. In his incoherent, jerky, stereotyped way of thinking almost by word association, he seized on the Hebrew of Deuteronomy 21:23 (taluy) given as “hanged” and reads it as “lifted up” or “elevated”, making it synonymous with nasi, a prince or leader. Prominent scholars such as Dodd, Kittel and Bultmann have shown that the word used in northern Syria (bordering Cappadocia) was “elevation”. The crucifixion was the “lifting up” or “exaltation” of Yehouah’s slave in Isaiah 52:13.

What is interesting here is the exegesis by punning, a characteristic of the Essenes. Paul contrives to turn an offensive death into a meritorious one. The cursed one is the exalted one, the one whose head is raised above all others (taluy rosh)! What seems a series of jokes in bad taste is the foundation of Christianity. God moves in mysterious ways, unless, that is, it is not God but an opponent of God! Even so, it is typically Essenic exegesis and links Christianity again to the Dead Sea sect.

Paul almost saw the world in Zoroastrian terms, perhaps a legacy of his background in Cilicia, and the basis of the accusations of Gnosticism against him. His attitude was undoubtedly markedly Gnostic, and it is undoubtedly a degeneration of Persian religion. Humanity is involved in a cosmic battle, so people must chose individually between one side or the other. It is classic Zoroastrianism until the choice is considered. The Zoroastrian choice was truth or lie, good or evil in this material, physical world in which we live—and so too the Rabbis. Paul’s choice was good or evil all right, but good was spirit and evil was flesh. The world is intrinsically evil, and the battle is uneven because the evil spirit has on its side what people desire of the flesh—wealth, success, ability, knowledge—while God only has the human will to resist evil and be good (Rom 7:14-23).

Essenes had a similar view. Humans were born with different degrees of good or evil within them, but no one was born incorrigibly bad, and no one was born perfect. Whatever level of wickedness was intrinsic to their nature, anyone could aspire to perfection still by will power, by determining to resist wickedness and aiming for perfection. Those who were born with an adverse balance of evil within them had a greater struggle, but the reward was exactly the same as those who were born gifted with an essentially good nature and whose struggle was therefore much easier. The reward was, of course, the kingdom of heaven, and it remained up to the individual to decide whether they wanted the reward and were willing to try to achieve it. The effort was worth it for those willing to try, but it involved personal effort, will power! The notion that the flesh is weak appears in the Qumran literature (K G Kuhn, 1952), and is another fragment in evidence that Paul had trained as an Essene despite his Rabbinic claims. Pharisees had no such view.

Central for Paul is that the personal battle was uneven. The human will was at a disadvantage in the struggle. Evidently, Paul failed his novitiate as an Essene and had to escape—from Damascus (a code word for Qumran)! He had suffered a lack of will when faced with the immense personal sacrifices the top Essenes were ready to accept. He had been unable to meet the required standards. It dented his ego, and left him feeling guilty and frustrated. His answer was his mystical inventions. Repentance was not possible. It was too difficult. He has tried it and failed. He did not have the will for it, so there had to be an easier path. Paul believed in God all right. Few could have had more faith than he had. So, salvation must be entirely the gift of God, through His messiah, with no further effort of repentance needed. Faith in God was the salvific effort of will needed, an all together easier proposition than having to be good according to the law. Faith (pistis) effectively replaced will, because it needed no will at all, or not much, more a suspension of all reason, but that too was easier than having to think. Why then was effort now unnecessary? It was because of the advent of the messiah and the messianic age. Now faith sufficed, and Paul had it!

It sounds all fine and dandy, and is, if it is true, but it is not what the incarnated Christian God taught, nor is it what God had taught through Moses. God had always wanted righteous people, measured against His own standards. Jesus had the same message. God, his Father, wanted righteous men in His kingdom, and when they had not been righteous in their lives they could sincerely repent, remain righteous from then until the kingdom came, and be admitted. Being righteous required an effort of will. It was more than Paul could manage, and so he got rid of it for an all together easier faith. God’s purpose was that people should be holy like Him, and perfect like Him, and He had provided a measure of it in the law. The law expressed in one significant word is love, Jesus taught, but whether the law was one commandment or seven hundred, it has to be applied personally, by effort and exercise of the will. It could not be magicked away by a claim to faith.

Faith is a cop out. It is empty without works, as James wrote, even in the New Testament, and therefore in the sight of all modern Christians who ignore it. Works is doing something! It is doing God’s will, actually measuring up to the law, or measuring up to the criterion of loving your enemy. Paul’s rejection of will undercut Jesus, Judaism and Zoroastrianism because it is the effort involved in trying to do God’s will that is salvific. Trying to fulfil the law, and trying to love others is what takes people closer to God, not any self-indulgent faith. Paul’s psychological problem was that all of his efforts seemed to him to have failed. But he is not the judge of them. His ultimate decision that the effort was valueless, and his substitution of faith wrecked what God, if He is the author of the Torah and was incarnate in Christ, taught Himself. So Paul became the enemy of God. He distorted the value of the law, and he taught in opposition to Jesus. He sought to destroy Christianity and Judaism. Jews stepped away and ignored him. It was the Christianity of Christ himself that was destroyed.

The route Paul took was to use Abraham as the archetype of the man who needed no law but obeyed God through faith. Indeed, Hellenized Jews who had effectively discarded the law in the diaspora paraded Abraham’s steadfast faith as epitomizing themselves. Thus Philo (De Abraham 2:39) eulogized Abraham’s faith. Faith was accounted to Abraham as righteusness though he was as yet uncircumcized (Gen 15:6), but it led to circumcision, and that was then laid down as an absolute requirement of salvation. From Genesis, faith was an interim measure fulfilled in circumcision as a Jew. It cannot be properly argued that faith itself is salvific. In the Jewish scriptures, faith is fidelity or trust in God, and therefore trust in His will.

The idea of faith stemmed from the idea of fidelity, of loyal adherence to God and His law. As the law insists on works, so faith becomes a zealous obedience in the matter of fulfilling the law…
A Mayer (1930)

Fidelity is what the Jewish scriptures call the “fear of God”. It does not do not to fear God. Can anyone seriously imagine that a law can be bypassed on the grounds of faith in God? A proper faith is fear of God, and means obedience of God’s law. The Persian kings who gave the Jews their law in 417 BC made this an essential requirement:

Israel, what does Yehouah require of you but to fear Yehouah Elohim?
Deuteronomy 10:12

God acted through the Persian kings, and they through their judges (suffetim), so obedience was a good idea, as it is to any just law. Faith is doing God’s will, and, as James said, it is, of itself, nothing. It is quite impossible to claim a faith that has no practical outcome. Doing nothing is not an option. For Christ, the law was love. No one who fails to love can be saved, however much faith they profess to have. If Christian faith is not manifest in love of others and all that entails in practical life, then it is empty. It is worthless and not salvific at all. That is how serious the Pauline trick is for Christians.

At the head of Christian self-consciousness stands the apostle Paul, not Jesus nor the early church.
W Köhler, History of Doctrine (1938)

James in his letter could see no value in fear of God or faith without good works, though works without fear of God were equally valueless. A modern outlook would demur. Those who do good without having to fear God must be better at root than those who only do good through fear. The point is, though, that it does not matter whether you do good works out of faith or fear or out of some inate desire to do good, the reward is the same. There are no grades in heaven. It is the doing of the good that is the true criterion, but it requires the proviso that God decides, so no one can assume they ought to be saved. that is something modern Christians fail to do. They are rarely humble. The Ebionites considered Jesus the true prophet who taught the forgiveness of sins through good works (Clem Hom 3:7). The Zoroastrian view was that judgement was on everyone’s balance in the Book of Life, a book which gets a mention in Christianity’s Book of Revelation. All sins were in the debit column and all good deeds in the credit column, and at judgement, the balance was what counted. So wicked deeds (sins) could only be negated by doing good deeds to annul them.

Nor is Paul’s “faith” fear of God. It is a faith in magic rituals, sacerdotal procedures of assurance of salvation. The mumbo-jumbo seems to convince the Christian of the soteriology of it. Paul says that faith in it is bestowed by God and so the Christian has faith by God’s grace. Their own effort has nothing to do with it. They are God’s elect, so why did they need to be saved? Human will and endeavour is not in the loop. What then makes Christians so superior? The whole argument is circular, and circular arguments are never right. Moreover, Paul himself argues against it (Rom 2:17-29). There is no point in boasting of your righteousness, if you are not righteous. A circumcized Jew is not a proper Jew if he habitually breaks the law, despite the outward sign he bears. The law is the measure not anything else. The same must be true of faith. There can be no point in the Christian boasting of it if they do not practice loving others. Love is the measure of their faith. Paul’s angst prevents him form coming to this obvious conclusion, and instead he decides everything is internal, spiritual and to be judged by God. Indeed, that is true for it is obvious that an almighty being can read everything in anyone’s heart. Paul seems to think that the measures God has given to humanity are for Him to use in judgement, but that is obviously not the case. The measures are for humans to use in their relationships with each other, and no one who ignores them can be pure of heart. So, Paul is quite wrong, even in his own terms.

Paul uses more Essenic imagery in speaking of “the body of Christ”, “being in Christ” and “life in Christ”. Essenes considered their own individual people and in mass their community (yahad, church!) as being the true temple of God, not any building however impressive. Paul transfers the notion of the community into the body of Christ. It therefore sits well with the notion of the messianic meal and baptism being communion rituals. The bodies of Christians are members of Christ (1 Cor 6:15), not members of a club, that being another use of the same metaphor, but the parts of him.

Love as the basic principle of the law is common in the teaching of Jesus and Paul, so it is one of the few teachings of Paul’s messiah that he actually used. Either that or they both had a common source, probably in the Essenes.

Having given reasons why the messiah’s coming negated the law, we find that some Thessalonians were taking him literally. The law had been superseded. The messiah had come and was soon to come again to end the æon. So why work? Paul had to start inventing his own rules to replace the law, in some obvious respects at any rate (2 Thes 3:11). Later, the authors of Ephesians and Colossians were having to draw up long lists of dos and don’ts (Eph 5:1-5; 6ff; Col 3:5-9; 4ff). Even to the Romans, he had to explain what was not fitting. So, no sooner had Paul abrogated the law than he had to bring in new ones to keep the lambs good. The list in Galatians 5:19-26 compares with those in the Qumran Manual of Discipline. The ancient document called the Didache, except for 1:3 to 2:1 which is a Christian insertion, is a Jewish proselyte catechism explaining that no one should do to others what they would not like to be done to themselves. It too has echoes of the Qumran Manual of Discipline, as J P Audet first pointed out.

The New Testament letter, 2 Peter, frankly admits Paul is hard to understand (2 Peter 3:16). As Paul was making it up on the fly, it is often literally true, but the Jerusalem Church must have found it hard to understand what he was doing all together. Paul was not, of course, writing for Rabbinic scholars, something the Rabbinic scholars seem to forget, but for a mixed audience of Godfearers and Hellenized Jews, most of whom can have had little theoretical or even practical knowledge of the law, other than the Noachide law for gentiles. Paul’s teaching was aimed at those Jews and Godfearers for whom the law was a nuisance. Even A Harnack admitted (1908) that Paul’s justification for univeralism and abolition of the law was deep but knotty, hardly understood by anyone and unsuccessful. Paul was not the founder of the church of Rome, and it cannot have been Peter whatever Catholics choose to believe. It was surely a proselyte annex of the Roman synagogue for Godfearers and new converts thus fitting what Suetonius had to say in his life of Claudius. It was W Bousset’s view:

The problem of the letter to the Romans is best solved if we suppose as its readers a church consisting mainly of one time proselytes.
Religion of the Jews in Hellenistic Times, Ed H Gressman, (1926)

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Last uploaded: 24 April, 2008.