How Paul Invented Christianity 4
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, 8 July 2007
Abstract
Sacraments
“If Christ is not risen then our faith is in vain.” And at a stroke there evolved from the gospel the most despicable of all unfulfilled promises, the most immodest doctrine of personal immortality.F Nietzsche
The primitive Jerusalem Christians had an initiatory rite of baptism, and a communal meal, in which bread was ritually broken and blessed and water, perhaps called “new wine”, drank. The baptismal rite was a simple purification of the body, symbolizing the purification of the spirit by repentance, and the meal was an anticipation of the heavenly meal with the messiah. Paul ignored both and gave them his own sacramental, magical interpretation as remedies for death. The baptism rite was made to replace circumcision—it was the circumcision of Christ (Col 2:11-12)—thus conferring to Christians the fathership of Abraham and the title Israel. Circumcision was itself a replacement for human sacrifice (Exod 4:24-26), so baptism stood for a symbolic sacrificial death and resurrection, like Christ. Baptism “in Christ” or “in the name of Christ” meant something to Greeks as a kind of communion, and so it was for Paul. A Oepke wrote that Paul gave “an interpretation of the rite of immersion on the lines of the mystery religions”. It guaranteed the believer deliverance from an adverse judgement, when it came, through communion with the God. Baptism as a ritualized death and entombment with Christ to rise again to a new life with him was something Greeks could understand, and Paul offered them what they wanted and their society had accustomed them to—a sacramental participation in the death of their God. Paul even uses the language of putting on a divine garment, a rite of Isis, which conferred immortality:
As many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.Gal 3:27
Equally, the Eleusinian mysteries had a baptism which made the initiates “born again” into immortal life. Baptism happened in the rites of Osiris and Isis, the latter described by Apuleius, each being a form of ritual death and rebirth. Paul did something new for a Pharisee—made baptism into a sacrament. Since such a procedure did not exist in Judaism, it had to have come from the obvious alternative source—the Hellenistic mysteries. In the Hellenistic world, a sacrament was:
An action which by natural means brings into operation supernatural forces mostly by the use of spoken words which accompany the action, and which by their mere utterance according to the prescribed formula release such forces… So the idea of a sacrament rests on the presupposition that supernatural forces may be linked to natural earthly objects and to spoken words as their vehicle and mediator.R Bultmann
This is magic—thaumaturgy or theurgy (Gk theourgia, from theos, god, and ergon, work)—the art of making a god work on your behalf. Sacraments are a magic or miracle working event or activity. The Christians ones were to channel the Holy Ghost to work his magic to the advantage of the Christian. The vicarious baptism of the dead mentioned by Paul in 1 Corinthians is a gross example. Based on the illusion of supernatural coercion, it is the opposite approach to that taught by Christ, based on personal effort. The later heretics, the Cathars, had no sacraments other than the consolamentum and despised Catholic sacramental rituals which they mocked, giving Catholics the weapon of accusing them of the Black Mass. They were closer at root to the Ebionites and the true apostles of Christ.
The apostle Paul thinks sacramentally. His teaching is even more in the style of the mysteries than the mysteries themselves.A Schweitzer (1911)
The messianic meal of the Essenes and the primitive church—described in Enoch 60:7-8; IV Ezra 6:49-52; Syr Baruch 29:4; Test Isaac 8:11, 20, and in the Dead Sea Scrolls—is a case in point. Before Paul, it was a joyful feast celebrating the coming of the messiah and the expected uniting of heaven and earth, with a simple ritual within it of bread breaking. This was what the Last Supper in the gospels was. As it was a celebration, rather than a sacrament—which was always serious and solemn—it degenerated among the gentile converts into drunken partying. Paul insisted it was serious and solemn and and so turned it into a sacrament. It was a “remembrance” even though Jesus and Paul expected the world to End. Obviously, it became a remembrance when the parousia had receded, but it could not have been initiated as one. Christians no longer notice these contradictions because they never realize that Christ was expecting the End. But he was, as any careful reading of the bible makes plain, and he and Paul were both wrong. They will stick to faith however misguided it is. Paul made the messianic meal into another communion just like the Orphic omphagia where believers eat the flesh of the god, in the Christian case magically transformed from a wafer biscuit, and they were supposed too to drink his blood. Eating a god made the god part of them, and they were therefore partly god and could participate in the god’s immortality. That is what a communion is.
Doctrine, song and prayer stem from the synagogue tradition, but Paul’s interpretation of the rite brings the young Christian church into line with Hellenistic mystery brotherhoods. The explanatory words in Eleusis come close to the words of institution of the kyriakon deipnon [Lord’s Supper].H J Schoeps (1959)
The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ.1 Cor 10:16
Christians must think this ancient and savage ritual is the best that an almighty God could dream up to save them.
Similarly with baptism. Rather than being an outward token of inner repentance, Paul made it a magical act of spiritual cleansing and therefore of consecration. The new sacramental bath miraculously washed away sins with little or no inner conviction, or determination needed. The later habit of baptizing infants who could not repent and could have had no sins to repent of proves that Christian baptism had lost its original and proper meaning and become a sacrament. Christian sacraments meant the rejection of the baptism in repentance of John the Baptist and Jesus, and instead the reception of some gift of the Holy Ghost (Acts 19:1-6). It is the gift of communion with the god and so participation in his immortality.
This interpretation springs doubtless from the Hellenistic churches which understood the initiatory sacrament in which they were instructed on the lines of the initiatory sacraments of the mystery religions whose meaning was that the adept shared in the destiny of the cult god who had suffered death and risen again to life, like Attis, Adonis and Osiris.R Bultmann
It is quite true that the Essenes saw salvation as the absolute gift of God. Salvation still had to be earned, though the reward remained the whim of God, but they did not believe that God was dishonourable, and so those who followed His will were rewarded. The reminder that the reward was God’s gift, and not an obligation of anything they had done, was to keep them humble, for God could not be expected to treat graciously any presumption on their part. It reminded them that they really must try to be perfect like God, and could assume nothing on His part.
The conclusion is that Paul fashioned the Essene tradition of the messianic feast, a prominent feature of the Qumran scrolls, to make it a divine communion popular in the Hellenistic mystery cults. He made it into a sacrament which by a magical or miraculous ritual confers to the participant the qualities of the god, most notably immortality. What began as an eschatological feast, even for Paul, applicable to the last human generation oif the final age, transformed with the failure of the parousia into a syncretized Jewish-Pagan sacramental ritual with no timescale implied, thus laying the basis of the Christian churches.
No one sensible at the time, notably the Jews, could see anything in Paul’s claims. The primitive Church was typically Jewish in being cautious about prophecies of the End. The Essene prophets tried to read the future in their allegorical interpretations of scripture but when things did not turn out the way they expected, they admitted error and returned to the texts to decide where they had gone wrong. Doubtless they were no less deluded in making the attempt to prophesy from old books, but they accepted the precept of Deuteronomy that the prophet was false who prophesied falsely. Not so Paul and the Christians. The law could not be right because it had been superseded, and so Paul must have been right. He could always be right by the simple expedient of moving the goalposts. The resurrection of Jesus did not foreshadow the End of the world. Nothing changed. Most Jews who had remained loyal to Jesus even though he had been crucified rejected him as the messiah because nothing changed. Pauline Christians persisted in their belief and still believe it all these centuries later even though no supernatural End happened, and there was no new beginning in a perfect world.
Martin Buber explains that Jews cannot accept that God interrupts history, so there can be no cessation of an age until the very end of time, when His own creation is brought back to perfect completion or consummation. At this time alone does God assert his divine unity over all things, His ultimate sovereignty over creation in its fullness, not merely over one section of humanity who think they alone are redeemed. Jews saw no enclaves of redemption. The synoptics are clear that Jesus and John the Baptist both thought the End of the World was nigh, preaching “the kingdom of God is at hand”. So, they, Paul and the primitive church were all wrong.
The failure of all these expectations should have led to the abandonment of an absurd belief, but Paul’s manipulation gave rise to its continuation. He started a dogmatic theology that justified the absurdity, and that is his real triumph. He developed it ad hoc to transfer an imminent End into an ever receding future. This was his motivation for writing—to remove the difficulties of believers in the face of the failure of Christ to come, and especially to counter the jeers of the infidel. Later generations, those that should never have been, had to face the same ongoing problem, because for many, as today, the belief remained that Christ was coming soon. It was overcome by Paul’s great invention, the elevation of hope into faith, the elimination of sight, reason and practical experience by substituting blind, unquestioning and illusory faith in an impossible dream—the acceptance of a never-ceasing, imminent coming.
God has obviously rejected them as deluded or even satanic. What was a temporary mingling of the old æon with the new has produced no observable change in reality over two millennia. History proceeds as it always did. Christian faith blinds to the interminably repeated obvious. It was obvious then, as biblical authors make clear (2 Peter 3:3-4). Fathers had died yet their children waited, 1850 years ago! The Christian saviour and his chief saint, so they believe, were both as wrong as could be. Who could benefit from this other than Satan?
An excuse offered and still believed is that God did not understand human time. For Him a thousand years were as a day, so that when God tells us the End is tomorrow, He does not really mean it! Really, in God’s reckoning, it is a thousand years off. But an almighty God would realise that, surely? Christians will accept this as a reasonable excuse, nevertheless. Yet the same Christians will not accept that when God’s word speaks of a day in creation, he could really have meant a God’s day. And, if a day of an eternal God could be a thousand years, it could as easily be a million or a billion. The parousia never happened arounf 1000 AD either, so we are no wiser about what a day is to God. If the scientific timescale of geology is accepted then six days to Good is about 13 billion years so each God day is really about 2 billion years, and Christians have a very long time to wait before “soon” yields what hope for.
The fact is that the world goes on as before. The false theories of Paul were wrong. The laws of Nature are unchanged. Dead men only walk in “living dead” movies and the gospel of Matthew. Wars continue apace, not infrequently started by Christians. Crime expands, often organized by church going believers. Believers peddle drugs and build gambling empires with no fear of active disapprobation by their Christian peers. Paul’s theology brought nothing new to the world except an obtuse refusal to use the brain and senses God had given the creatures who flattered themselves were made in God’s own image. One can only conclude the Gnostics were right. Satan intercepted God’s plan, and put bags over Christians’ heads leaving them to live in their own imaginations.
Life, example, teaching, death, the meaning and right of the gospel as a whole—nothing existed any longer…F Nietzsche
Moses and Exodus
