Christianity
The Evolution of Paul’s Christology
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, 8 July 2007
Paul’s Soteriological Theories
Paul believed the crucifixion of Jesus for our sins was the crucifixion of the world (Gal 6:14) which was therefore passing away and would soon end. Paul maintained Jesus had been born of a woman, of the line of David but in poverty, then he had been resurrected from the dead, glorified by God with the title Lord, previously reserved for God Himself, and a place in heaven on God’s right hand. The death of this sinless man atoned for human sin, so people could enter the new world sinless and perfectly righteous thus meeting all the prescriptions for entry into heaven. It is not what the Christian God incarnate, Jesus, had taught. According to Mark, Jesus had even denied he was a son of David. Jesus’s teaching about righteousness was no effortless magical cure for sin. He repeatedly called for repentance and thereafter absolutely upright living until the world ended. He knew and did not disguise that a big personal effort was needed, but said it was worth it. It was better to pluck out an eye than to sin, if it meant you would never enter God’s up and coming kingdom! Salvation for Christ was not easy. Paul made it easy by saying all that was needed was an untestable declaration of faith in Christ. Christians had two options. A hard one offered by God and an easy one offered by Paul. They took the easy one. They seem unconcerned about what God thought of it.
Not only is Paul’s teaching opposed to that of God when He was on earth, it is utterly incomprehensible to Jews, who were, after all the chosen people of God, until Paul declared otherwise. The notion of atoning for human sin through the death of a demi-god is alien to Judaism, and for an excellent reason. God warned them off it. The people who liked this idea were the believers in the Hellenistic religions of the Greeks and Romans. Jews had discarded human sacrifice with the incident of the binding of Isaac. Atonement was entirely by temple sacrifice of animals according to the level of the sin. Paul was a Jew and knew of Jewish customs, so he hybridized the Jewish idea of atoning sacrifice with the Greek idea in the Hellenistic mysteries of the dying and rising god. Lo! He had the atoning death of a god. In 2 Cor 5:19-21, Paul explains that God had made Christ to be sin and to reconcile the world to Himself. Here Christ is not pre-existent but is a creature. Paul is drawing an acute parallel between his concept of the atoning death of the god and the temple atoning sacrifice, whereby the guilt of the sinner is laid on to the animal to be sacrificed and becomes a “body of sin” to be disposed of. The innocent animal effected atonement for the sinful human, and this transferred in Paul’s thought to the need for God’s human sacrifice to be sinless. In particular, Paul and John the Evangelist identified Jesus with the Paschal lamb, sacrificed and eaten at Easter.
Thus the new covenant of the Christians was sealed with blood (1 Cor 11:23f) and God sat on His mercy seat peaking out from behind the veil to verify the outpouring of blood (Rom 3:25). Though all no doubt symbolic, it is even so quite obscene, and especially to Jews for whom blood is literally life, but not to Orphics who tore apart a living animal and ate it raw (though they then became lifelong vegetarians). It signifies the mentality of Christians that they can see the hand of any Good God behind all this offensive sorcery. People who can believe all this gory carnage can murder anyone unflichingly, as they have done throughout history. They cannot see how God could forgive anyone without a bloody expiation. They could slowly roast living people to death convinced they were doing God’s will. Modern Christian leaders like Bush and Blair grin that they will readily meet their maker convinced He will honour them for having murdered myriads of innocents to end the life of one man they decided they did not like after all. In this absurd and devilish faith it is impossible to do wrong. Do they ever wonder whether they have the right god?
In Zoroastrianism, whence came Judaism and Christianity, entry into heaven is on the balance of good and ill done in anyone’s life. The Greedy Hellenized priests that took over the Jerusalem temple, when Persia fell to Alexander, expanded temple sacrifice from a mundane taxation system into an elaborate system of magical atonement, all meant to make them rich out of people’s guilt. Paul got rid of all the mess and paraphernalia by making the sacrifice notional, but the monetary rewards for the clergy, beginning with him, remained. It has proved a great scam but has nothing to do with any God’s plan. Zoroaster taught that everyone has a personal battle with evil. There is no magical nostrum to cure you of it, but what you have is a feeling of guilt to make you aware when you do wrong. Then it is up to you to make it right by resolving it, or if it is too late for that, by doing some good deed that is far more significant than your wicked one, so that you will put the balance of your account in the heavenly Book of Life into credit. Christ was teaching something similar by saying that everyone had to love others. To love others, you do not do them misdeeds. Love was Christ’s way of saying make sure you accumulate your treasure in heaven. To imagine you can do ill deeds and atone for them by magic or by confessing them and being absolved is not only absurd but it promotes wickedness.
If there was a previous speculation in Judaism about the death and expiation of sins by some figure, it could have been Isaac, idealized as a martyr in IV Maccabees as one willing to die in obedience to God. The foolish danger of such thoughts is seen today with the Moslem suicide bombers who consider that the boy offered was Ishmael, the first Arab, not Isaac. Hellenized Jews particularly of the diaspora knew the story of Isaac and admired and exalted his image. It was found on the frescoes of the synagogue at Dura-Europas. In the Septuagint, Genesis 22:16 is reminiscent of Paul’s words in Romans 8:32, as Origen had noticed, according to Migne 12:203. Paul was obviously familiar with it, and, though he did not explicitly use it, Christ was just as obedient of God—unto death. So, Christ was of the type of Isaac, at any rate according to Barnabas, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Irenaeus and Origen, and for later Church Fathers, commentators and artists. Both were obedient sons willing to die at God’s command. Is it coincidence too that Philo was contemporaneously expanding the myth of Isaac by claiming he was born miraculously and was a son of God (De Mutatione Nominum 23:131)?
Paul’s fancies and misexegesis of the scriptures in the Jewish view, and evidently in the view of the appointed apostles, could not of itself cause a break between the diaspora Christians and Judaism. The reason was the Jewish good sense based on the principle, “Wait and see”. A century after Paul, Rabbi Aqiba thought he had found a messiah in Bar Kosiba. Following the Jewish scriptures, Jews would say, “If he is, he is”. “He was not.” The same applied to Paul’s theories. If he had been right, it would have shown. Whatever any prophet said, its truth is shown in history. That is why Christians deceive themselves, and have built a system to continue the deception. The prophecies of a messiah and the end of the age were wrong whether by Paul or by Jesus.
Christians prefer to stay beguiled by the Hellenistic and classical Pagan notion of the son of God. The classical Gods had sons with mortal women. It was a cultural norm of Greek civilisation, with an explanatory value. Fortunate men were blessed by gods or godesses, and were under their divine guidance. Exceptional men, like Alexander the Great, were sons of God. Their greatness was explained by the god-like abilities they had from their divine father. The Jews rejected such ideas because their scriptures told them that God was singular, the only saviour, and He did not mess around sexually with human women except to bless them with abnormal fertility in old age. All men were sons of God in a sense, but exceptional men were sons of God in Judaism by anointment, not by intercourse. Perhaps Greeks did not get that son of God to a Jew was an honorific title for a prominent man like a king or a priest, and did not imply any divine impregnation.
Essenes seem to have eschewed oil for water, and “crowned” their senior figures by baptism rather than by anointment. It is not far fetched that all Essenes considered themselves to be sons of God. It was a mark of fellowship, koinonia, in an egalitarian brotherhood. To judge by Jesus, they habitually called God Father and taught others to do the same. It seemed to be a matter of piety to do so. If all of them called God their father, then they were all sons of God. All were surnamed Barabbas! It seemed to be a particular title of senior Essenes presumably judged to be closer to God, but all were sons of God, so all were bothers. Though Christian theologians deny it, because it implies that Christianity evolved and was not revealed, this will have been the origin of the Christian use of the self-same titles for clergy, and in monasteries and nunneries. All were bothers and sisters to each other, but their communal leader was a Father or Mother to them, and all were fathers and mothers to lay people outside. Anyway, son of God was a title all Essenes had, especially as Jews doing their level best to be perfect as their father in heaven was perfect. The practice of calling God Father is vouchsafed in works like the Wisdom of Solomon (2:18), the Psalms of Solomon (13:9) and Ecclesiaticus (4:10), so either it was a general practice of pious Jews or these books were written by Essenes. It shows that Jesus was not announcing his own divinity nor was he being superior in speaking of God as his Father in heaven, and therefore implying that he was ason of God.
Paul liked to call Christ Lord or kurios to his Greek speaking audiences because messiah meant nothing to gentiles, and even Christ, meaning someone anointed, meant nothing to them. Through calling Jesus Lord, Paul trianed his converts to know what Christ meant. Jesus was Lord Jesus, Christ Jesus and Jesus Christ. Christ was, though, similar in sound to a Greek word meaning “good”, chrestos, so the converts knew Paul’s new saviour (Jesus) was a Lord (a divine title) and he sounded good. Not only that but chrestos was a common name for good slaves, so here too is a hint of Paul’s image of the suffering slave who was glorified by God for his goodness. The title Lord was, of course, one used by Hellenized Jews in place of the ineffable name of God. To them, it meant God. For the Greeks, it meant the dying and rising god of the mysteries. The Septuagint habitually translated Yehouah as Lord and Elohim as God. The real name of God was thereby not uttered[†]What is Ineffable? Now, some senseless fanatics refuse even to write the word God, as if it would reveal some divine secret! Instead, they write the absurdity G-d, as if God was God’s ineffable name.!
The effect of Paul’s clever use of the word Lord was effectively to deify Jesus, thereby drawing the gentiles and the Hellenized Jews into a common belief. Already there was the implication that the heavenly, spiritual (pneumatic) figure of the son of God while on earth had assumed the incarnation of the son of David. So the kurios was God and also fully human as the son of David. Christ is equal to God already in Philippians 2:6. Paul “eulogises” Christ in 2 Corinthians 11:32, using the word that applied for Jews only to praising God. For any Jew to equate anyone or anything with God was blasphemy. Presumably Christians are glad Paul blasphemed his god, since, without it, there could have been no Christianity, but now no Christian is allowed even to examine the basis of their religion, let alone blaspheme. Christ had a word for this—hypocrites. The divines of the Church since Origen have judged Romans 9:5 a declaration that Christ is God, and, in 2 Corinthians 4:4 and Colossians 1:15, he is the image of God, and in the latter the first born of the world. Christ came from heaven (1 Cor 15:47), participated in the creation of the world (Col 1:16) and so too in 1 Corinthians 8:6, ascended back to heaven to sit by God’s right hand (Rom 8:34; Col 3:1), would again return from heaven at his parousia (Phil 3:20) and judge humanity (2 Cor 5:10). While leaving some ambiguity about it, presumably to make it more difficult for the Jerusalem Church to nail him categorically, these elements taken together show Paul had deified Christ.
The trouble is that when, according to Paul, God appeared as Christ personally in the world face to face with apostles he had chosen, and surrounded by disciples, he did not tell anyone about all this. Quite the opposite. Jesus always showed the greatest respect for God as his Father in heaven, treating him as a distinct person. Later this identity of God and Christ necessitated the invention of the Triniy to try to make sense of it. It remains nonsense. So far as Jesus was concerned God sent him, but he was not God. By making Christ equal God all God’s Old Testamant attributes were transferred to Jesus. Thus, “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Joel 2:32). The name to be called on was God’s name. The Lord is not a name but a title. What then is the name of the Lord, if the Messiah is meant? In Paul’s logic, it must still be God’s ineffable name because God is Christ. But, if Paul is not right, Christians are calling on the wrong name and so are not being saved. Then when they say, “Jesus saves”, they are wrong, “Jesus does not save”, Jesus is not God, and Jesus is not a name of God, nor is Christ. If God sent His saviour to tell people how to be saved by Him, God, but they are calling on God’s saviour to save them, then they have made a great error. Christians prefer not to use the organ they have in their heads, out of God’s grace as their creator, they tell us. It can have severe consequences if God really is trying to save them! Jeremiah said, “Let him who glories, glory in the Lord”, but he did not mean Paul’s Lord, he meant God. Paul made a man isotheos, equal to God!
The Jerusalem Church saw none of this in their late hero. For them, he was a reincarnated Joshua or “that prophet” prophesied by Moses, a Moses reincarnated, to lead the Jews into the promised Land, the kingdom of God. Then he had been humiliated and died as a suffering servant, but would come again, this time in glory as the archangel Michael leading the hosts of heaven. The Ebionite pseudo-Clementine works tell us what the successors of the Jerusalem Church believed. They abhored temple sacrifice of animals claiming that the sweet savour God liked was not that of burning bones, so they could hardly have accepted Paul’s hypothesis that Christ died as an atoning Sacrifice. Any such idea was alien to them, as was most of Paul’s Hellenistic speculation. The Pauline myth of the descent from heaven, the sacrificial atoning death, and the ascent of a heavenly man is un-Jewish and even un-Essene. Yet this mysticism prevailed, and the all together down to earth practical teaching of Jesus was swallowed up by it.
As noted, it was not that Jews had no concept of children of God—the Israelites as a whole were. The Rabbis had God referring to the law as “my daughter”. Philo (De Cherubinis 45-50) says Sarah, Leah, Rebecca and Zipporah were miraculously impregnated by God, and Philo calls Moses a divine man, but Philo was a thoroughly Hellenized Jew deliberately cutting his didactic cloth to fit the Greeks, rather like Paul. Even some passages of the Jewish scriptures hint at divine sonship in Psalms 2:7, a ritual formula for those anointed as sons of God. But there were also the Bene Elohim (sons of God) of Genesis 6:2.
The Rabbis insist that Judaism had no tradition of divine sonship, even so, but the Rabbis aimed to distance later Judaism from Christianity so they deliberately curtailed all such speculation. Nothing unequivocally prescriptive of earlier Jewish thought can be had from rabbinic writing. To quash all consideration of what might have been true of Judaism up until the split with Christianity, the rabbinic myth is that Judaism was monolithic, with all Jews devotedly pharisaic. It is manifest nonsense as even The Life of Brian makes clear, although it still takes people in. At the time of Christ, Judaism was anything but monolithic, it was riven by sectarianism, and was probably never any different after the collapse of the Persians.
It is impossible to exclude the possibility, or even likelihood, that some branch or sect of Judaism, even in Palestine, had adopted Hellenistic features. The sacerdotal priesthood certainly had, and that was a source of dissension. Among the features of Hellenistic culture in the ancient world were divine men mediating between heaven and earth, saviours and sons of God. And, would you believe, Judaism and Christianity used to exist in the ancient world and used to be part of this culture. The idea of the son of God who is a saviour was a widespread idea of the countries that had once been Persian, then became Greek and remained Hellenized for the next three centuries. Asia Minor or Anatolia—Modern Turkey—and Syria were such countries, and it is no coincidence that Paul, the Christian missionary, had such success with his hybrid theories of the Jewish saviour Christ in these very places.
The Jewish objections are given in Isaiah, and this is typical of several quotable passages:
I am Yehouah (Septuagint, The Lord!). That is My name. And I will not give My glory to another.Isa 42:8
The Rabbis explained that God said, “I am the first”, because He had no Father, and, “I am the last”, because He had no son, and, “Beside me there is no God”, because He had no equal! Moreover, “God is not a man that He should lie” (Num 23:7), but any man who says he is God is a liar. Paul’s soteriology is impossible for a pious rabbinic Jew, but the qualifiers “pious” and “rabbinic” are the point. The Rabbis succeeded the Pharisees who were far from the majority of Jews despite their influence. More important is “pious”. It is certain that more Jews in the Hellenistic world were impious than were pious, by a long chalk. Moreover, as Judaism was divided into many sects, even if they were pious, what variety of Judaism were they pious about?
It looks increasingly certain that the Essenes were far more important as a Jewish sect than either Christians or rabbinic Jews have wanted to concede, for their different reasons. The Rabbis wanted to pretend that the Judaism was monolithic to make Christians like Paul into outcasts and blasphemers, while Christians would not tolerate any concession to the Jewish sect from which they had emerged because Christianity had to be a one off revelation by God and not a development from existing beliefs. The truth is that Christianity evolved. The marginal Jews of the Hellenized diaspora had a barely understood Jewish tradition and were surrounded by the all pervading Greek culture in the west—the Roman empire. It will not do for Jewish scholars to pretend there is no evidence that Jews were influenced by foreign beliefs. The evidence is ultimately rather large. It is Christianity, and Paul’s explanation of how he made it up from whatever he had that was convenient to him.
Paul and Salvation History
Paul has the Christian delusion of thinking he is God, or knowing precisely what God thinks. Everthing is predestined by God and can be read by the signs, an Essene belief. Paul desperately needs to feel he is right. He does violence to Jesus’s Judaism and the Jerusalem Church while continuing to think he is a good Jew.
Origen (de Princ 4:22) tells us that the Ebionites put understandable emphasis on the words of Jesus when he said, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Mt 15:24). For them, Jesus was a type of Moses, being the prophet Moses had prophesied (Dt 18:15). Both had the same role, to lead the Jews into the promised land except that the land promised by Jesus was to be the kingdom of God in which Jews would rule the world. When he failed, the Ebionites waited for the parousia which never came, but did so as Jews without prematurely rejecting the law. They remained as half Jew and half Christian, rejected by both, but accepted by the Arabs until they influenced the thinking of Mohammed before being absorbed by Islam. Jerome said that the members of this most divisive heresy wanted to be both Jews and Christians but were neither Jews nor Christians. In Jerome’s judgement, Christ himself can have been neither a Jew nor a Christian! A Christian to Jerome was a Pauline Christian. The Ebionites were proper Christians, and therefore not a Christian to Jerome.
They believed good works were the sign of true service to God, not merely faith. They retained their faith in the teaching of Christ on the coming kingdom of God not invented miraculous sacraments. A gentile could convert to Christ, but also converted to the law and the God of the Jews as being the same (Clem Hom 4:22). They believed that by doing good works all Jews and gentiles would be drawn into Ebionite Christianity. Christ was the “true prophet” for them, but the gentile Christians of the Roman empire were taught by Paul he was Lord and Saviour. Paul prevailed in the west. In the east, the Ebionites did in the sense that, having crossed the Jordan into Arabia, they eventually became an element of Islam, whose holy messenger inherited the Ebionite title of Jesus, “true prophet”. In his letter, Barnabas warns of certain people for whom Judaism and Christianity are of the same covenant. These must have been the members of the Jerusalem Chruch who became Ebionites and Nazoreans. The date was about the time of Bar Kosiba.
Luke, if he is the author of Acts, had abandoned hope of an imminent End. The first generation of Christians did not turn out to be the last generations of human beings, so the eschatological interpretation of the death of Jesus had to be indefinitely postponed:
Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep all things have continued as they have from the beginning of creation.2 Peter 3:4
Once it was clear that the prospects of an early return had passed, all of Paul’s efforts at abrogating the religious law of Jesus and the Jews became problematic. They needed a law to know what was right and wrong for Christians no longer expecting the world to end. The discipline of a Jew was too hard, so they welcomed its departure, but now found that a discipline was necessary. Paul himself had had to give new rules, and his successors gave more. The Church Fathers produced books full of them. Law had returned! Works had returned in practice, at least for the doctors of the church, if not for dukes and princes. Clement of Rome wrote a letter urging Christians to live a life pleasing to God, and like Him as a creator feeling joy in good works.
In the second century, Marcion, who came from Anatolia, half a millennium earlier the main western region of the Persian empire and still with a strong Persian tradition, was Paul’s bulldog. He saw Persian dualism in Paul. The world was in conflict between the forces of good and evil, and he thought Paul’s angst about the law of Moses was an utter rejection of it, not just an acceptance that its time had passed. Paul was, of course, all things to all men, so could take an opportunist line when it suited him, but he does not seem to have rejected the law as being evil itself. Indeed, he said the law was “holy, righteous and good” (Rom 7:12), so it could not have been the product of the devil, as Marcion claimed. Paul had presented himself as fighting against Judaizers, though they were really Jesus’s own apostles, disciples and church in Jerusalem. Marcion took the fight to its logical conclusion. Jews were demonic, and Christianity ought to be purged of everything Jewish. Jesus was, of course, an honorary non-Jew, and he had been teaching what Paul taught. The apostles were malicious idiots. It does not really flatter the man who had been deified by Christians, although these arguments have been retained by Christians and are still taught in sunday school to infants. So, Marcion was evicted from the early church. Though Paul had assiduously dug the footings himself, Marcion deeply entrenched anti-Jewism into the foundations of Christianity. Origen reported that his supporters claimed Paul sat on Christ’s right hand, and Marcion on his left, presumably on God’s knee.
Paul said shocking things about the law, so it is surprising neither that pious Jews objected nor that Marcion took the view he did. Paul claimed the law brought wrath (Rom 4:15), incites to sin (Rom 7:7) and first brings out the power of sin (1 Cor 15:56) then increases sin (Gal 3:19), and is subject to death (2 Cor 3:7).
With the fading of the hope of an early parousia, the Church Fathers turned back to the need for will. Tertullian, Barnabas, Hermas and Justin, thought in terms of a new Christian law by which people achieved merit in the eyes of God. Irenaeus saw a smooth relation between the laws of Nature and the new moral law that made men just. Hippolytus, the pupil of Irenaeus, thought Christ would wash away sins but only after someone had shown it was what they desired by putting in a determined effort themselves. Christians were aiming to copy the perfection of Christ’s life and their guide was the remnant of the law still acceptable to them—the ten commandments! Clement of Alexandria expanded on Paul’s advocacy of faith alone by expanding his epigrams in relation to it:
- The just shall live by faith—faith in keeping with the covenant and commandments.
- By grace are we saved—yet not apart from good works
This is the doctrine, forgotten by most born again Christians today, that Christ is the pinnacle, the perfection, the fulfilment of the law. To imagine that salvation is by faith alone is to be saved by Satan, not by Christ. Paul argued that the messianic age destroyed the law when Christ taught the opposite—he came to fulfil it.
Origen is a devout Pauline but thinks Paul in Romans 9-11 is mooting a world law, but a much shorter one than the law of Moses—the new law of Christ. Cyprian states categorically that the Christian earns God’s grace through good works. It is not an arbitrary gift to any rogue who claims to have faith. Christ is his teaching and precepts and it follows that Christians must abide by them—must endeavour to be a Christ! Nothing could be more logical than that the disciple of a teacher considered to be God should do what the God does and says! That is what the Cathars believed, but the sacramentalist church extinguished them. The members of this church ignore their God and do what a man of dubious reputation tells them. Which of them then is Satanic?
Christ did not abrogate the law and he plainly said so. Church Fathers mainly accepted it, believing that Christ had abrogated only the Pharisaic extensions to it and their excessively legalistic interpretation of it. Saintliness was the extent to which Christians tried to live righteously, the extent to which they loved others. Saints were righteous, and the law had been given to the Jews by God as a measure of righteousness. The usual caste of sacerdotalists had elaborated it into a money spinning scam, and all of those elaborations are worthless and can be ignored whichever set of priests want to apply them. God does not build temples and needs no money for their upkeep or their ministers. God demands charity in its true sense—kindness and caring towards others in their misfortune. Christ taught that saints would be rewarded for their saintliness—for their loving kindness—not for their faith alone. Sinners were unrighteous, meaning they cared only for themselves and could not care less for others, and they too had an appropriate reward—punishment.
This is what Christians call Judgement, but they have forgotten what they are judged on, and think it is just for believing. How puerile. Judgement is on the balance of good and evil in a life, and the Christian God made it utterly certain to his followers that the balance was not on a knife edge decision. The gate to perdition was broad, so the line was not drawn at fifty-fifty, good and evil. The truth is that only God knows where the line is drawn according to the Christian writings, and so they had better be sure they accumulate enough of a credit balance. That is the “treasure in heaven”, that their incarnated God spoke of. It is simple Zoroastrianism, and shows what Christianity owes to the much more ancient religion of Persia.
In the Roman empire, the eschatological hope remained with the converted Pauline Christians, even if their doctors were planning the future, if no parousia happened. Christians inclined always to take every disaster, every barbarian incursion, every defeat in battle, and every civil disturbance as preliminary to the End, and cheered. It is a reason why the Romans distrusted Christians for centuries. They seemed unpatriotic. Of course many listened to their doctors and tried to live upright lives, conscious that they would be judged at the End, but they did not understand the angst-ridden basis of Paul’s revision of Christianity. The Reformation was to revive the exaggerrated Pauline theology followed today by most American Christians.
Meanwhile the church falsely claimed that Christ, Paul and the chosen apostles were utterly united in their view of salvation. The Catholic picture had to be harmonious. No one could dissent because the sacred Christian texts were not available for scrutiny by unconsecrated eyes! They were written in Latin at a time when the church had destroyed education, and so most people could not read, and certainly could not read Latin. Only the top men of the church could understand it, most lesser priests simply mumbling the services to almost empty churches during the Dark Ages. Heretics translated the bible and gave reading lessons, but were burnt to death and scattered by the Inquisition. The received wisdom of harmony was not challenged until Luther, and he opted for the wrong man. He favoured Paul, the false apostle, over James, the preserver of Christ’s tradition.
Peter was chosen as the founder of the Roman church because he had been the right hand man of Christ, though Paul had been the main influence on the gentile churches. Paul had not founded the Roman church himself, though he did have a connexion with it. But as Paul and Peter agreed on everything, according to the church, the choice of Peter was a matter of prestige not history or doctrine. Luther revived Paul, and revived faith alone, mixed with a virulent conception of sin that was seriously fleshly. In Zoroastrian dualism, the choice of good or evil was entirely with the individual. Human beings were of the good creation of God, and the evil spirit could only make things unpleasant for human beings. He could not make them do anything. They had free will, so all he could do was tempt them. He is shown tempting Jesus at the outset of his ministry in a scene which shows the first Christians believed the world was ruled by the devil, not by God. Jesus was not tempted. It is meant to illustrate how people should behave. The choice was a personal one. Since Luther, Protestants have made sin tangible, a force, and they can excuse wickedness as not their own fault, but the fault of the devil, tempting them.
By its total misinterpretation of texts like Romans 7:15f and Philipians 3:12, the Reformation became unable to truly understand the mind of Paul in the light of his Christian perfection. Paul did not consider himself to be the persistent sinner justified by faith alone—the type of Christian that Luther knew himself to be.F Overbeck
Even so, Paul’s view of himself according to Overbeck is no more perceptive than Luther’s—both want to be absolved of any responsibility for their sins. The Pauline and Lutheran attitude is a dangerous delusion that is proved by the plethora of Protestant madmen ruling the USA today. Protestantism, which has its roots in heresy, became Paulinism interpreted by such as Luther. Luther made Paul into a Protestant messiah, doing the same as Paul himself did, just when there might have been a hope that the original Christian teaching could emerge. Nietzsche realized that he attacked Protestantism and Luther by attacking Paul. Nietzsche was not against Christ so much as against Paul whom he saw as erasing practical goodness for mysticism.
Paul reduced the life of Christ to his death and resurrection to suit his anti-Christian construct of the redemptive death and sacraments. Paul was an incoherent dialectical thinker, a user of antithesis and contradiction who is hard and often impossible to understand. Yet Christians say they can understand him because they like his conclusions. The outcome is that all they need for salvation and life after death is to profess Christianity whatever else is put to them however compelling or true it might be! Now how satanic is that? And naturally they cannot conclude that Paul is the anti-Christ, even though he taught in opposition to Christ, and what is more persuaded the bulk of Christians to believe him and ignore God! Faith alone requires no thought, indeed demands no thought, for thought can only weaken the empty, dogmatic Pauline faith. And God, according to the bible, created mankind in His own image with a brain. Did He mean us not to use it? That alone ought to answer the faith of faith alone, but it is too easy to want to give up. The devil and his anti-Christ have won… so far.
A God who died for our sins—redemption by faith, resurrection after death—all these things are falsifications of true Christianity…F Nietzsche
