© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, 8 July 2007

Abstract

The Critics of Paul

The epistle to the Corinthians shows that Paul was faced by several factions in the church at Corinth proving that Christianity from the very beginning was spallated. There were followers of Paul and Peter, but also Apollos and some simply had “Christ” on their banners (1 Cor 1:2). The so-called Judaizers were emissaries from Jerusalem who had the authority to inspect Paul’s work. Delegates were sent from Jerusalem into the diaspora to collect tithes until the fifth century, so Paul could not deny the authority of the pillars (styloi) of the church. In Antioch, they were specifically ambassadors of James and corrected Peter on table fellowship. In Corinth, they were from the Jerusalem Church and had a letter of credit as proof (2 Cor 3:1) that must have been issued by the head of the Church, James. The Clementine Recognitions (4:35) speak of special testimonia from James. In Galatians, the Judaizers insisted on circumcision—and wanted the churches to follow the Jewish calendar of festivals and the Jewish sabbath—but the implied criticism of Paul is inconsistency in requiring it not consistency in not requiring it.

In 2 Corinthians 11:1-12, Paul is manic in his own defence, and in his vigour is clear what his opponents’ charges against him are. Central is that his overweening conceit has distorted his thinking, that he is a foolish boaster, and Paul sarcastically accepts the charges to reply to them. Among the charges he attempts to refute in 2 Corinthians are:

1. his boasting is unbounded (10:8,13,15;11:23)
2. he is insane (stronger than “foolish”) with boasting (12:11)
3. he is deceitful (12:16)
4. he did people wrong (7:2;12)
5. he is unreliable (1:17-18)
6. he is weak (10:1;11:21)
7. though clever, he admits he is no speaker (11:6)
8. he has no personal presence (10:1,10)
9. he can achieve nothing with worldly weapons (10:2f)
10. his measure is false (10:13)
11. his experience or evidence is dubious (10:15)
12. he alters God’s word (4:2)
13. he hides his true message (4:3)
14. He preaches himself (4:5)
15. He denigrates Jews (11:23f) but boasts of being one (11:22).

His defence exacerbates and illustrates the accusations. The “pillars” at Jerusalem had the authority of Christ, and few scholars disagree, so Paul just defies them. Plainly he was not appointed by Christ as an apostle but says he is no less than those who were because of claimed visions that no one else can confirm—Christians cannot resist anything that cannot be verified! He is not a false apostle, the true apostles are. He does not change God’s words, they do. He does not accept payment, they do. Just in case his visions of Christ are not impressive enough he has been to the third heaven! Hellenistic “pneumatics” made claims like this to uphold their claim to the secret knowledge of gnosis. It shows Paul is a Gnostic or is appealing to Gnostic allies in the Corinthian church against the representatives of the mother church in Jerusalem.

Paul argues that his ecstatic visions are superior to personal knowledge of the incarnated God. The chosen apostles show he is unworthy because he had persecuted them when they were being midwife to the new born church. Had Paul been more successful, there would not have been a church! Paul felt the impact of this accusation strongly and boasted in argument (1 Cor 15:8) that God’s grace was responsible, and he had worked harder than the apostles had.

The pseudo-Clementine writings give the attitude of the Ebionites, the Jewish Christians who emerged from the residue of the Essenes after the Jewish wars. Paul in these works is identified with Simon Magus. He is the enemy, the antiChrist! He was a pseudo-apostle who taught apostasy from the law of Moses and a gospel of lies. This Ebionite work vigorously defends the original chosen apostles of Jesus. Indeed, a thirteenth apostle is as impossible as a thirteenth month in a year (Recognitions 4:35). Peter is shown as upholding the principle expressed by him in Acts when a replacement was chosen to replace Judas—apostles had to bear witness to Jesus in his lifetime when he was teaching and preaching his gospel, the earthly Jesus! A vision was subjective. No one else could verify it, so it could have been a boast, an illusion, or even a satanic trick. Christ, alive for over thirty years and ministering for several years with twelve apostles and a crowd of other disciples and followers, could not have been a boast, a trick or a vision. Those who witnessed Christ in action did in the presence of the others, so they all automatically verified each other. It could not apply to a lone man who could make any outlandish claims that he liked, and did. The pseudo-Clementine Peter is certain that visions, even if genuine, are tools of an evil demon or a lying spirit. He says:

The personal knowledge and the personal instruction of the true prophet gives certainty. Vision leaves us in uncertainty. For the latter may spring from a misleading spirit which feigns to be what it is not.

To the pious in their earthly lives truth comes not in dreams or visions but in the full consciousbness of the waking mind. It was in this way that the son was revealed to me by the Father. Hence I know from my own experience the meaning of revelation. As soon as the Lord asked who men considered him to be, I said at once, “You are the son of the living God”. And he who pronounced me blessed on this account, told me that it was the Father who had revealed this truth to me. Since then, I have known what revelation is, namely, the discovery of truth without instruction, vision or dream.

If Jesus has become known to you through visions, then it is only in such wise as in his anger He grants visions to his enemy. How then can anyone be instructed through a vision so as to be capable of teaching? And if you object that it is possible, how is it then that the Master spent a whole year with us teaching us with our whole minds fully awake? How are we to believe that he, in fact, appeared to you at all? How can he have appeared to you when you believe the exact opposite of his doctrine? If, however, you have become an apostle as the result of an appearance which lasted but one hour, then you should proclaim and expound his teachings, you should love his apostles, and not quarrel with me who was with him on earth. You have opposed me who am an unshakeable rock, the chief pillar of his church. Were you not my adversary, you would not calumniate me, and despise my preaching, with the result that I do not find the response of faith to teaching which I have heard directly from the mouth of the Lord, as though I stood condemned and you were highly praised. When you call me condemned, you are arraigning God, who revealed Christ to me. You are impugning the Lord who, because of this revelation to me, pronounced me blessed. If you really wish to work for the truth, then first of all learn something from us, learn what Jesus taught us, and as a disciple of truth become our fellow worker.

Homilies 17:14-19

Doubt has been cast on the pseudo-Clementine literature, but it seems to contain genuinely Ebionite thinking. The author must have had Ebionite sources when he sat down to write, as well as the Christian canon. Here is the other side of the dispute between Peter and Paul, and put with a great deal more humility and patience than Paul showed on his part. It is not the end of Peter’s critique of Paul (Simon). He also accuses him of preaching only what will please people and so preaching improperly. He denies Paul’s claim to apostleship through visions and revelations that no one else can confirm (2 Cor 12:1-5). He treats as outrageous Paul’s claim (2 Cor 5:16-17) to know what Jesus was sent for better than Peter, the rock upon which Jesus would build his church, because it is old hat. Finally he demonstrates with citations from the Jewish scriptures that visions are unreliable because, even if sent by God, He sends them only to His enemies, otherwise appearing in person and had sent Christ for a prolonged stay on earth to pass on His news. No brief vision could possibly be claimed to be better than knowing God’s messiah. Only a devil could try to make people think it. The scriptures say no one should listen to the words of a prophet or a dreamer of dreams, for God is testing you:

And that prophet or that dreamer of dreams shall die, because he has spoken apostasy against Yehouah your God.

Dt 13:5

The followers of Paul have failed God’s test, and Paul should die as a false prophet. Moreover:

The family idols speak iniquity, and the divining ones have seen a lie and have told false dreams. They comfort in vain. On account of this, they wandered like a flock. They were troubled because there was no shepherd.

Zech 10:2

Elsewhere in the Ebionite work (Recognitions 2:61ff), Simon the sorcerer (Paul) boasts of ascending to the world of unfathomable light, just as Paul boasted of ascending to heaven. Peter emphasises truth as the point of genuine revelation, implying that Paul was teaching contrary to truth because it contradicted what Christ had taught in his lifetime, and Christians ever since have distorted the meaning of truth to be whatever they define it to be. The Ebionites considered Paul the antikeimenos or adversary that Paul himself had warned of (2 Thes 2:4). Peter as the first chosen apostle of Christ emphasized that there is no other gospel besides the one that Christ personally taught his disciples. Paul was not teaching Christ’s gospel but the opposite of it, saying that Christ’s word was now outdated by his own! Those whom Christ had chosen to perpetuate his teaching were opposing Paul, opposing what he taught. That is why Peter was denouncing him as the enemy of truth, who had twisted his words by speeches opposed to the law. In the Clementine Recognitions (3:61), Paul is the exthros, the antiChrist. Peter and James were the ones with the true kerygma of Christ, as ought to be obvious, but is not to Christians, and only James as the leader of the church in succession to Jesus could approve the kerygma passed on by any apostle teacher or prophet. That was why Paul was so keen to seem that he had James’s approval, but the Ebionites said he did not have it, and the Ebionites were those who were closest to James. The Ebionites thought that, under the pretext of proclaiming the truth in the name of the Lord, Paul was actually spreading error. James is the Vicar of Christ in the Coptic gospel of Thomas.

The conclusion is that Paul was not acceptable to any of the earliest Christians that remained close to James, but that his false teaching survived in the Roman empire far away from its source and the people that knew Christ best. Those people, the Ebionites and the Nazarenes were swallowed up by Islam at a later date. The Pauline heresy became the mainstream of Christian belief. Christians are blind to what happened because they are taught never to question their false faith. The spokesman of the Ebionites, Peter explained it all, but the lying spirit, the Druj, has prevailed and has conquered the world, while the gospel of Christ has been ignored. So it is that Satan has frustrated God with his cunning at beguiling stupid humans, and has triumphed in what Paul had said was the messianic age. Cathar heretics of the middle ages tried to bring the right gospel, and the gospel of the Lie incinerated them into extinction. What little remained as Protestantism was so disfigured and compromised with the Lie that it was equally wicked.

The End is Delayed!

Paul’s new theology soon became even newer apology. The messiah expected at the end of the world had come, and had been crucified, but the End of time did not come! So Paul explained it had been delayed! These notions of a saviour appearing at the end of time are Zoroastrian, and in fact it was the Persian king Darius II who had set up the temple state of Jerusalem thus starting Judaism. It had therefore begun full of Zoroastrian ideas, if not effectively as a type of diluted Zoroastrianism, just as the Noahide law was a diluted law of Moses for gentiles at a later date. The treaty that set it up was a covenant (berith) between God and the people. In those days treaties were guaranteed by the gods of either side, and the Jewish side of this treaty was guarded by the Jewish God. It was, through, administered by God’s regent on earth, the king and his chancellery, and the king was the Persian shahanshah, the king of kings, Darius II. The eschatological expectations of Judaism were with it from its inception, brought in by its Persian founders, as scholars like Wellhausen, Mowinckel and Buber have surmised, even though they continued somehow to believe many Jewish myths as history that could no longer be held. Darius said to the Jews:

You shall be my possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine, and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

Exodus 19:5-6

The Jewish scriptures record this as the word of God, though it makes more sense as a pronouncement of an emperor like Darius. The founder king of the Jews, David, is a mythologized Darius, and David’s kingdom would last forever (2 Sam 7:12f), a notion that entered Jewish consciousness. J Héring has noted that the figure of the messiah is absent from the works of prophets considered as pre-exilic, so the messianic idea came with the “return”, some time after the defeat of the Babylonians by the Persians. Bousset, Reitzenstein, Kraeling and other eminent scholars cannot find the title “son of David” for the messiah until the Psalms of Solomon (17:23) written as late as 48 BC, less than a century before Jesus. Jesus, of course, denied in Mark that he was a son of David, but they prefer whatever Paul says to whatever the incarnated form of God said every time, so they believe Jesus was the son of David. It fitted Paul’s notions so must be true.

After the fall of Persia, Jewish history became fraught, the lowest castes of them, the proselytes and the Israelites suffering direly under the rule of get-rich-quick priests, the Ptolemaic kings who backed the priesthood, the Seleucid kings who did not trust them, the Hasmonaeans who fought a long civil war to free the people from Greek oppression, only to oppress them more, and finally foreign rule again under the Romans and Herodians. People suffering apparently interminably put their hopes in the idea of a saviour, the Persian saoshyant, and the ending of the age. The expectation of an eschaton substituted for the loss of all hope in actuality. This despair of the present, the earthly and the real led Jewish sages to project their hopes to the future, the unearthly and the supernatural, and so it has remained since for dreamers and inadequates, being the basis of Christianity. The brief period of about a century of peace and fruitful endeavour setting up and administering the temple state under the later Persian kings became a golden age, and was mythologized. The apocalyptic expectation was that he or his son would return as the messiah, the regent or vicar of God, to begin a new world and end the wicked æons.

Though fantastic, these hopes for some were a miraculous salvation, but for others they were political—hopes for a change in the situation on (or in) earth. Jews expected an ideal ruler to restore the covenant and the golden age of Darius/David, thus fulfilling God’s will on earth. The golden kingdom would rise from the stump of Jesse, Jesse being Israel, Judah having arisen itself from the stump of Israel when it was absorbed by the Assyrians. Some people thought the final age was not the perfect age, the restoration of the perfection of creation, but was another æon before the End, and preparatory to it. The idea of an additional preparatory æon became popular about the middle of the first century BC. The perfection of creation followed that [†]

The messiah was expected to come on the clouds, according to Daniel 7:13. In 1 Chronicles 3:24, the last of the line of David was called Anani, a name based on the Assyrian word for heaven and its God (Anu) which even appears in Greek in words like ouranus (Uranus), and in Latin, Janus and Diana. “Ani” is therefore a word that can mean “a cloud” in Hebrew, and so the last of the line of David was the “One of a Cloud”, like the son of man in Daniel, or otherwise is the “Heavenly One”. Needless to say, Christ did not come on a cloud and has not bothered to return on one. He was born of a woman in the normal way whatever speculations there might be about how she became pregnant. He himself was expecting the hosts of heaven when he waited in the Garden of Gethsemane:

What Jesus expected was the advent of a heavenly man “on the clouds of heaven”, who would inaugurate in the visible world of the kingdom of God…

J Héring

Only by rationalizing Christ’s failure to meet the messianic requirements and inventing a second coming do Christians manage to perpetuate their delusion.

Jews believed the messiah acted for God, but was not Him. God was the saviour, not His messiah (Isa 49:6). So, the messiah was a political figure even though he was an eschatological one. The end of the æon marked the beginning of a new one that the messiah would begin by leading as the king of the Jews. The inscription on the cross is proof of that belief. The divine kingdom was on earth, but it was divine and so perfect. It was the kingdom of heaven, as Matthew calls it, because it was heavenly, a combination of heaven and earth. The mythology of these beliefs was not, however, settled. The doubt was about whether the perfect age began with the messiah, or whether the messiah ruled over an interim period at the end of the dying æon first. Daniel and Enoch imply the resurrection of the dead was at the beginning of the messianic kingdom, Baruch and IV Ezra made it the end of the kingdom so that they arose into perfection not imperfection.

Jews in the first century were discussing IV Ezra 6:7, on when the first historical æon ended and the second began. What distinguished Christians was that they knew when, because the resurrection of Jesus had started it, and Matthew even says men had risen with Christ. It was the general resurrection of Hosea and, at any time, Paul believed the world would transform from being corrupt into being perfect. Then all that were judged worthy would live forever. So Paul considers the messianic age as the end of the old dying æon, preparatory to the coming perfect age of God. Since the resurrection of Christ, everyone was in an interim period preceding the ultimate End. Believers had to endure this interim period. It continued unabated, and Christians now call it the Apostolic Age. But no new æon began, or if it did, no one could distinguish it from the old one—unless it was worse!

There is plenty of Jewish Talmudic evidence for the belief in the interim period of forty years, a Jewish generation, that appears in the gospels, sometimes put in the mouth of Jesus. There are other guesses for the duration of this period too, including 400 years, and even the full millennium. At such a length, it is hardly interim, but longer than that and it is another æon itself. Forty years matched the forty wilderness years of the Jews in the Exodus myth, but more pertinently for Paul, it matched the length of the reign of king David. The Essenes had the same idea but it was a forty year interval between the death of their righteous teacher and the arrival of the messiah of Aaron and Israel. The same interval appears in Qumran fragments like that commenting on Ps 37:10 (4Q171), after which all the wicked would be destroyed. The Essenes perceive this as a period of the final cosmic battle between Good and Evil, the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness. Paul has similar ideas and could have had them from the Essenes. He declares:

The night is gone and the day is at hand.

Romans 13:12

No Essene could have expressed it better. This was written about 56 AD, around 25 years after the death of Jesus on conventional dating, but 35 years after the date of 21 AD, which is more feasible based on clues rather than the probably phony dates inserted into Luke and Josephus by the Church. If Paul was working on a forty year period until the End, then it was getting close. He thought death and corruption would cease at the end of the appointed time of forty years (1 Cor 15:24-26), and the appointed time was short (1 Cor 7:29). Christians should…

…rejoice… the Lord is at hand.

Phil 4:4-5

He could hardly have been expecting an interval of 2000 years:

Paul was spurred on by the disquieting thought that the proclamation of the gospel must be speedy, and that the time granted for it had narrow limits, for the risen Jesus had been snatched away from the earth for a short while only. His return would take place within the briefest spell, within a few years. If not weeks or days…

F Overbeck

What Paul expected was the messiah to come down from heaven with God’s host of angels in flaming fire to judge and purge the world (1 Thes 4:16; 2 Thes 1:7-10). Elsewhere it is God himself who comes (Ass Moses 10:7; Enoch 1:3; IV Ezra 7:33; Sibyl 3:308). Jewish speculation associated this cosmic event with the voice of an archangel, a heavenly trumpet, and the resurrection of the dead. The Essenes knew the archangel to be Michael, the angel who was seen as God’s chief general in the battle with Evil. It seems clear that this is the visitation Jesus expected at Gethsemane, where angels or an angel actually appear. Only God knew exactly when the visitation would be, so it would be sudden and unexpected, like “a thief in the night” (1 Thes 5:2). Jesus expected to see this event himself, Paul did too, and it is symptomatic of the self-delusion of Christians that they revere these men as God-sent but are still waiting eighty generations later.

Paul taught and preached frantically convinced that his generation was the last one of the wicked world. The end of the ages was to be visited on the generation he addressed (1 Cor 10:11), the old æon was passing away (1 Cor 2:6), its form was passing (1 Cor 7:31), and, now you see it, now you do not, it had already gone (2 Cor 5:17)! So Paul had no idea that his gospel would have to be passed on to a second generation after this one, then endless others after that. These people would be called now, in the very state they are in now (1 Cor 7:20ff). Jesus had started it all as “the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep” and the rest of the dead would follow (1 Cor 15:23). If the dead were not raised then Christ himself never rose (1 Cor 15:13). It is impossible to deny that Paul spoke as if convinced the End was so imminent that living people would witness it (1 Cor 15:51). A few years’ later he had been forced to think again, but naturally he did not think he had been wrong, he thought the parousia had been delayed. This time he was right! He had started the Christian tradition of moving the goalposts when shown to be wrong. The general resurrection visible to those stil alive had to be modified into a resurrection only after death:

The doctrine of resurrection post mortem is certainly an innovation imposed by the brutal fact of a delay in the parousia and the numerous deaths in the Church.

J Héring, The Kingdom of God and its Coming

Paul has to distinguish the resurrection of Jesus from that of the saints. He never overestimates the intelligence of believers—he just calls it a mystery, and it suffices! Even so, he understands some of it. The End now happens in stages, different stages and different resurrections. There are two resurrections, as there are in Revelation 20:4-6, where there is also a millennium delay (better make that two millennia). It is called making it up as you go along. Anyone with a brain cell can see the Christians were already having to prop up their unsteady theology before the New Testament had even been finished! Christians cannot see it! Judaism, if it had considered multiple resurrections, had rejected the idea, but Paul was forced into it by his own dogmatic conviction that the End was coming. Jesus had begun it with the first resurrection but the forty years of cosmic battle intervened before the final battle and victory of God when when the general resurrection occurred [†]

Here the messiah had appeared, initiating the messianic age, but he had been killed and risen again, events not prophesied as messianic. For Paul, it was not the general resurrection but merely a signal of it. Paul began teaching people that faith saved people from death not what Christ had taught, but Paul’s Christians were still dying, even though the messianic age had begun. Though they had been declared delivered from the evil and corruption of the wicked age (Gal 1:4), they were still dying. The real problem with Paul’s teaching is the very foundation of Christianity—that faith conveys eternal life and is sufficient to do so. It is the salvation of fools as Paul openly bragged, but his followers did not seem to notice. Paul’s Christians had had the faith to convert, and felt they were therefore entitled to eternal life, just as the clappies of today still do for no other reason! The resurrection of Jesus ought to have meant they would not die, at least so Paul told them.

It was not what Jews, including John the Baptist and Jesus, believed and taught, if we are to accept the gospels. Salvation and eternal life depended on righteousness—living according to God’s will, and the measure of that was God’s law sent via Moses. A Jew who had not been righteous according to the law had to repent with absolute sincerity and thereafter follow the law without a single transgression. Baptism symbolized before the world that the person had undertaken the vow of repentance before God, and was now spiritually pure. To break the law after that, even in the smallest way, as Jesus insisted without mincing words, was to end up locked outside the gates of heaven. Any sin after baptism debarred the penitent from heaven, irrespective of their faith. Their sin proved their disobedience of God and so their lack of faith. James wrote an epistle apparently to refute Paul’s teaching in which he made it quite clear that faith was empty without works. For the sake of Christians who evidently cannot understand what is fed them on a spoon, “works” means good deeds—for Jews, behaving according to the law! Paul taught the law was no longer necessary, but then had to prescribe to his converts how they ought to behave. Having sold them easy salvation, they continued to behave abominably and he had to tell them how to behave by giving prescriptions to replace the law he had so easily discarded.

Plainly Paul’s picture of Jesus was at odds with that of the apostles and disciples who knew him in life and knew what he had taught them face-to-face. Now Trinitarian Christians will accept that Christ was God incarnate but ignore what he taught in favour of what Paul, a charlatan and opponent of Christ’s chosen successors, taught instead. R Bultmann summarized it thus:

In primitive Christianity, history was swallowed up in eschatology. The primitive church understands itself not as an historical but as an eschatological phenomenon.

History and Eschatology (1958)

The apocalyptic End never came and so all of the teachings that depended spcifically on the coming End and even on a forthcoming imminent parousia were all wrong. They are wrong for the obvious fact that the End never happened and so teachings that revolved around it were mistaken. The only thing to do, once that was realized, was to return to previous teachings that had served people well until then.

Paul knew little about the life of Jesus, and considered it meaningless and irrelevant after Paul’s vision of him. Paul cannot have began by thinking Jesus Christ was God, if he had not the least interest in what the incarnated God did and said while he lived on earth as a man. Nevertheless he treats him as if he were God to his converts by giving him the divine title, Lord. Plainly he cannot have been sincere. He has invented an idol for his converts, and seems to come to believe his own propaganda, but it is typical of his irrational mind set, and unreliable behaviour. Christ is a mindless symbol of his own apocalyptic theories, taken from the Essenes and manipulated to suit himself. He was challenged by the proper apostles of Christ or their emissaries who explained what Jesus had actually said and done. Paul had to deny it. He countered the appointed apostles who appealed to and quoted what Jesus had actually taught with this dismissive principle:

Though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more.

2 Cor 5:16

Paul says there was no didactic purpose in God appearing as a man with his own characteristic ministry. God’s words spoken as a man were pointless because the æon of men is passing. The new age is an age of the spirit, so a God dressed in flesh is irrelevant, even ridiculous. Paul, Christians must believe, knew better than God, and the proper theory, Paul’s theory, is that God appeared on earth only to die and be resurrected, thus proving that the æon was passing. It was not the message that Jesus taught, even though Jesus also thought the age was ready to pass. For Jesus, the imminence of the End meant people had to repent and make sure they were righteous until the End came. For Paul, sinners only needed to have faith. Both were wrong about the passing of the æon, but Christians prefer to stick to Paul’s easy message rather than God’s hard one. The question is why God should implement Paul’s and not his own teaching when it comes to judgement and salvation. Two thousand years on we are waiting for the Age of Aquarius, another æon. It must be time Christianity was exposed as a fraud by anybody’s standards. Paul could find no merit in the stories of Jesus as history except as a type of dying and rising God, so he ignored the whole historical background and detail of Jesus except his death and resurrection, thus changing the message and pushing the historical man into the background in favour of a phantom.

In Philippians 2:6ff, Paul does affirm that Jesus was a God before he became a man, and in 1 Corinthians 15:44-49, a letter written about the same time, Christ had his origin in heaven. It is an idea that the Persians had first and passed into Judaism, as Dibelius pointed out. The descent from heaven also spurred on the idea of this being descending further into hell, although this world was the hell meant, and either by misunderstanding or extension, the saviour was made to descend further. This man from heaven was also a rock (1 Cor 10:4), more Iranian imagery. Though the Jews did not identify the pre-existent rock with the messiah, Philo did identify it with the pre-existent Logus which John then identified with Christ.

So, the poor man of the synoptic gospels, the poor Galilean, was exalted by Paul into a cosmic assistant to God, superior to the angels, then God Himself, and this is still how Christians like their God to be. Though they think it romantic that God wanted to appear on earth as a poor man, it is not considered any sort of recommendation. Blessed are the poor in spirit must mean to them that depressed people are blessed, so heaven is full of sad people! Nor has it seemed a warning to them that poor people should not be killed when they can be characterized as an unlikely threat and so the murders justified. So much for the Prince of Peace.