Abstract

© Dr M D Magee, Contents Updated: Friday, 30 September 2011

What is a Christian?

Opinion polls published by such as Pew, Gallup and Baylor in recent years have shown the poverty of the self proclaimed “Christian Nation”’s knowledge. At one time, what was considered to be over 90 percent of the US population were proud to be called Christians. That headline figure has fallen considerably but is still high. However, more refined studies have shown that most of that supposed 90 percent of US Christians do not have a clue about their own beliefs. They will proclaim the bible as the inerrant word of God, but a simple question like “What is the first book in the bible?” cannot be answered by a large proportion of those who profess absolute respect for a supposed divine book—the disciples of Christ! In fact, a small number of such questions serve to prove that less than 20 percent of the population of the “Christian Nation” can really be Christians—only that small number know enough about the religion to be able to know what is necessary to be a Christian.

It follows that, in practice, the US hardly differs from other modern secular countries in having only a small proportion of religious believers among its ranks. The rest either do not accept or practice any religion, or only vaguely accept a god, a spirit world and an afterlife, but otherwise live purely secular lives. What distinguishes Americans is the stronger peer pressure to conform with an American ideal, part of which is being committed to Christianity. Americans think they ought to be Christians to be good Americans, so they say they are, even though they do not know enough about it to even qualify. Indeed, what they think in general betrays their complete misunderstanding of Christ, whom, in his moral values, they simply assume to have been a typical American himself.

Now, given that around three quarters of US Christians know very little Christianity, it can come as no surprise that Americans rarely show the least bit of mercy towards others. Americans as a mass are vengeful killers, and it never seems to occur to them that they might be killing the wrong people—innocent people—just as the Christian story has it that Jesus himself was innocent and was wrongly killed. They have hardly progressed from how many were 100 years ago when they thought it proper to save the efforts of judges by stringing up black men as the strange fruit of local trees. They effortlessly judge someone else as a “bad guy” and that is what they perforce are without the need for the proper process of law, or, given the chance of due process, prejudice gives assurance that no defense can succeed for them. When the media label as “bad guys” someone foreign, it goes without saying that they are, and deserve to be bombed, and their assets stripped, as a punishment for seeming bad to the average US Christian.

It is all understandable because these US Christians have no idea of what “mercy” means. You need to have read the New Testament gospels to get the message passed on by Christ that Christians must be merciful, they must not personally rush to judgement, and must ensure that their own vision is clear before they criticize someone else’s view. All of this is written plainly in the gospels, is not difficult to get the gist of, and was once the basis of Christian morality taught in schools and sunday schools. Jesus was not prescribing a legal system—Jews already had a God given law—but ways ordinary people could behave in practise that ensured they lived according to God’s law. Yet without reading what Jesus taught, how is anyone to know what his teaching was?

The lazy so-called Christian will say their pastor told them all about it, but they then have to know their pastor was telling them the truth, and they can be sure of that only by reading it for themselves, without their pastor telling them what it means. Pastors might be deliberately lying for reasons of greed or politics, or they might simply be misinformed themselves because they have trusted the false guidance of their own teachers. The reliance of Protestant America on this caste of liars and opportunists for their understanding of Christ and his message negates the main achievement of the Protestant Reformation—the liberation of the ordinary citizen from the power of the priest by placing the bible before them in their own natural language, and inviting them to see for themselves what Christ had said and done. The Reformation was a transient revolution, the old Catholic priesthood being replaced by a new caste of ersatz priests instead called pastors and ministers but doing the same as the medieval Catholic priesthood—telling the layperson what to think.

So the ordinary US Christian rarely has any other than a benighted view of the thoughts, words and deeds of Christ and how he introduced a new practical approach to human morality, that of love of others. Instead the benighted ones were misinformed that they inherited the promised eternal life just by deciding that it sounded good enough for them to want it. They were told just to declare themselves as Christian and God is fool enough to believe them. They need not have been so easily taken for a ride. All they had to do was to verify that their money grubbing pastors had properly informed them what Christ had to say about it by reading it for themselves. They do need to use some intelligence in doing it, and that is another problem for many of the benighted, though most ought to be able to understand what is an essentially very simple message.

Love, the Law and the Old Testament

The Christian regards Christ, ostensibly a man, as none other than God in human form. It follows that the words of Christ recorded in the gospels ought to carry exceptional weight in understanding the meaning of the Christian religion. The educated Christian knows that these books were written down by human beings, fallible people, many years after the event, so they cannot be considered to be necessarily Christ’s precise words, but the sentiment is usually clear and simple, and the same sentiment is usually repeated in the record of Christ’s sayings in different places, and in different words, but still the recorded words of God resounding from the mouth of the man with whose body He had fused. Only occasionally can these words be doubted on grounds of being suspected interpolations—when they stand out as being contrary to the teaching reported generally, or when they defy the known historical circumstances of the time but match those of the church at a later date—but such judgements need a more careful study than is possible from an initial reading.

What can be appreciated at a first reading is that Christ is remembered not as a conventional Jewish teacher. The gospels go out of their way to show that Jesus was not repeating orthodox Judaism, but rather was offering a new and memorable understanding of the Jewish law, considered by Jews as God’s law, but nonetheless strict and demanding. The reader of the gospels will find that Jesus was not declaring God’s strict law wrong, but was proposing an all together more natural and less legalistic way of applying it in practise. So, he was not teaching what the Jewish scriptures had taught—the law! He was teaching what everyone should do to meet what was most important in the law, its purpose—to be kind and caring to other people—to love them!

If Christ were God, as Christians are supposed to believe, he could not have been abrogating the law of Moses because it was His law as God, but anyone reading the Christian Old Testament, which is most of the Jewish scriptures, can see that lots of petty ordinances had been introduced, often simply to boost the take home pay of the temple priesthood. Many such laws have nothing to do with how human beings—Jews in this case—should behave to please God. They have little to do with morals. Christ’s new criterion of love was to miss out all the priestly gerrymandering with the law, and to put before people a straightforward, commonsensical measure that everyone could easily appreciate, and apply to bring them within spirit and intention of the laws that God had previously specified, but had been obfuscated.

For this reason, it must be quite wrong to do the opposite—to seek out bits of the Old Testament and use them as weapons against people. That Christ came not to abolish the law but to fulfil it does not mean, as ill-spirited, financially and politically motivated pastors and Christians so-called make out that Christ’s new criterion was added, as a new feature, to the law of the Old Testament and often subordinated to it, but rather that the new criterion of love itself fulfilled all the requirements of the Jewish law. Love of others does not abrogate the law, it fulfils it, but in so doing it filters the older laws and commandments of the Jewish scriptures, so that those which do not meet the criterion of love are filtered out, leaving only those that do meet it. Incompatible laws in the Old Testament are rendered moribund, and the others are subject to the primacy of Christ’s new law, where there is any doubt.

So, although it has always been absurd to pick on some Old Testament ordinances as absolutely true still, despite being opposed to the law of love, others which absolutely match up to the law of love are ignored. Adultery is a capital crime in the Jewish scriptures, just as homosexuality is, but bigoted Christians choose to hate homosexuals on the basis of the Old Testament, and contrary to the law of love, though many of them are adulterers deserving similar hatred, in its absence. Elsewhere the Jewish scriptures requires Jews to be perfect as God is perfect, but that is far too hard for most Christians to accept, though Jesus repeated it. The Old Testament is intended to be background reading for the devout Christian, meant to show the new morality as superior to the vengeful faddiness of the legal elaborations of the Jewish scriptures.

Salvation by Love or Faith?

The readers of the New Testament should note how their priests and pastors have elevated the writings of a man called Paul—a mere man, not a god, who began his career oppressing the early followers of Christ—to a higher level of importance than the reported words of God Himself, uttered when He was incarnated as Christ! Paul was the very first modern pastor, a man who saw the chance of a following and a fast buck by telling everyone what Christ meant—and they believed him, not those of Christ’s words that were preserved, thereby negating the intentions of God! Christianity changed from aiming to practise what Christ preached to practising what Paul preached, not the same thing at all.

Given that the two approaches do differ, who should be believed? The Christian believes Christ to be God, so surely there is no question about it. Paul is a man, Christ is God! Why then do Christians believe Paul and ignore God, even making excuses why they do, when they are clever enough to notice. It is because Christians want to be saved, and want to be saved without effort on their own part. Paul makes salvation easy—effortless. For him, faith is sufficient. For Christ—God—you have to do something—love other people. Faith is no substitute for doing it, although it helps the believer to have psychological confidence in God in doing so. Living the life of Christ, devoting your life to loving and caring for others, is what saves, not faith alone.

As James points out in his epistle—which the Christian should consider an essential clarification of the relationship of love and faith expressed by a man who knew Jesus intimately—faith alone is useless, it serves no one. All it does is give the egos of believers an unmerited boost, and leave them with the false belief that they are saved even though they have made no effort at all to do what Christ required. Luther, and modern Protestant pastors, who have effectively deified Paul, disregard James’s letter as “an epistle of straw” because it utterly refutes Paul’s Antichristian teachings—the type of false Christianity they rely on to give them false status in an Antichristian society, and a comfortable living if not considerable riches donated by their congregations, desperate to have their existential anxiety nominally assuaged. They are moral vampires.

Having read the gospels and the epistle of James, having understood what Christ was getting at—that salvation involved effort, the effort of showing mercy and compassion to other people—the reader can hope to understand the New Testament in its own context, a study that requires knowledge beyond that of the bible, and then appreciate how the distortions of Paul and the early gentile bishops changed the religion while it was still an infant lost in the Roman empire. Being a Christian requires not just effort in helping everyone who needs it, and being a pleasant human being, but also needs study especially to understand where it went wrong—how the Antichrist, Paul, made a moral outlook into a mystery religion, whereby faith in salvation equated with being saved, and how that became a tool of the establishment and a career choice for social leeches and opportunists, the professional Christians, and the very opposite of Christ’s teaching.

Yes, the New Testament teaching of the apostle, Paul, is the antithesis of Christ’s aim, yet modern pastors cite Paul far more often than they cite the recorded words of Christ. It shows that modern Christianity, especially Protestant Christianity is much more oriented towards what Paul had to say than towards what Christ had to say. Paul was the founder of Christianity as it is today, especially in the USA where the real Jesus has all but disappeared beneath a Rambo gargoyle of him. So, Paul should be ignored if Christ is to be understood. Anyone who doubts this should consider what could have been God’s purpose in appearing on earth as a man, if the thoughts, words and deeds of this man-God were to be immediately reinterpreted into their opposite by an opportunist jumping onto what he perceived as a Christian bandwagon. He saw there was personally more to be gained with them than there was opposing them.

Harmony in the Bible

If the traditional Pauline Christian argues that all of the bible is God’s word, he is left with the problem of what God incarnated for. After all, this God was, according to Christians, the creator of the universe for whom everything was possible, so why appear, teach a new morality, do things to demonstrate it, and tell people it was a tough call, only to have Paul, a mere man, countervail it by telling Christians that morality did not matter so long as they had faith. James corrected Paul—faith was dead without Christian deeds. If faith did not manifest itself as the morality Christ had lived and breathed, then God’s incarnation was useless, and without it anyone’s professed faith was insincere. It was merely boastful pretense intended to fool others or to delude themselves.

So, the Christian who reads the bible as if it were a uniform, cohesive book of moral guidance is at best naïve. Every biblical scholar knows it is a compilation of different books, by different men writing at different periods in time, so it cannot be considered uniform. It has to be read with the knowledge that it is a mishmash, and the Christian cannot claim to have faith in God as Christ without realizing that God’s purpose in appearing as a man was to correct the false beliefs that were rife. The words of Jesus necessarily take precedence over Paul’s and those in the Old Testament, but even the gospels themselves are by different hands, and also written at different times under differing conditions.

If God, allegedly as the Holy Ghost, could ensure that the multiple hands of the bible could all miraculously convey the same message, then one has to wonder why there are so many biblical sects—around 30,000—each of which finds something to disagree with in the ideas of the others, though all are based on the same “inerrant” texts. Mind you, one has to wonder why, if God can make people write a perfect book in an imperfect world, He cannot make perfect people. “Free will” is always the answer. People can choose to be bad. Yet the biblical authors apparently could not choose to write anything untrue in the perfect books of the bible.

Then again, Christians, of their own free will, pray to be saved, they pray to be good Christians, they pray to be perfect, like the perfect book. Yet those same people complain that people cannot be perfect in an imperfect world, unlike the book. Why cannot their prayer be answered? It is not that those Christians want to persist in their sinful lives and their false beliefs. The point can only be that human beings have to exert themselves to do right—they cannot rely on God to do everything for them, for that is an abrogation of free will. Prayer is a cop out, a denial of free will. People have to show, of their own will, that they want to do God’s will. They have to be willing to show kindness and consideration to other human beings as human beings, any of whom—like Jesus—could be God, and have to be treated as if they are—even enemies!

It is hard. But the reader of the gospel stories of Christ know he never said it would be easy—quite the opposite. Paul’s greedy pastors made that claim to get easy and compliant congregations who would keep them comfortable, or even rich! Unrighteous people are punished rather drastically, according to Revelation, so one might have thought they would take more care to be sure they are doing what Christ taught them to do, and not some easy option that a local confidence trickster offered instead.

Treating the bible as a vade mecum fails to recognize that each of the authors in it, though writing from the standpoint of one tradition or another, also wrote as individual people. The bible is not coherent. Fundamentalists try to concoct a spurious cohesion by a spurious exegesis in which separated and unconnected parts of the bible are assumed connected by a miraculous thread. The miracle is that so many people believe it. If it were true, like any allegorical interpretation of any book, no one can know what the intended interpretation was, once the original key is lost.

What happens then is that the interpreter puts his own interpretation into the text, not the intended one—in the bible’s case, not God’s, or the supposed overseer of the work, the Holy Ghost’s. The pastors just put together what suits them, and the Christian punters who can read Jesus’s words for themselves, are amazed that the secret message has emerged, one which usually negates what Christ was teaching. If it does not, then the secret message is pointless, the direct message says it better.

So, the supposed harmony of the bible is less an assumption than a lie. Why, oh why should a benevolent God want to make His central messages so obscure that only a caste of crooks and “get rich quick” shysters can read them? Why do people, who trust the idea that God is mighty enough to create the whole universe, not trust the idea that He must therefore be capable of posting a message that is easy to understand? The Christian should trust that God can tell them what He wills, provided that they read it with a determination to understand it in its proper context. As the gospels—notably the first three synoptic gospels—are plain enough in meaning without interpreters, it can only be the grifters, the priests and pastors, who are confusing the message to serve their own purposes—and Paul was the first of them.

Christ’s Message

If anyone wants to get Christ’s message from the bible, it makes sense to begin with what Jesus is recorded as having said, and what he did himself in the brief period of his life on earth narrated in the gospels, and in snippets elsewhere. A core Christian belief is that Jesus was God incarnate, so whatever he said was the very word of God uttered from His own human lips, the only caveats being:

1. Were his words remembered and reported correctly?
2. Were some of his reported words not actually his, but later expedient beliefs of the early Church put into his mouth to give them his authority?

Mark, the first gospel, was not set down until the end of the Jewish War, around 70 AD, at least 40 years after the crucifixion, a long time for speeches to be remembered accurately, but the synoptic gospels do not record continuous extended discourses like the fourth gospel, a much later work of literary speeches not meant to be accurate reporting. What Christians remembered were pericopes, memorable snippets, epithets, maxims and parables. The seemingly long address called the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew is really a collection of pericopes put together to seem like a speech. In other gospels, these pericopes are found elsewhere scattered about during Christ’s ministry. The earliest gospel, Mark, has no such long address, and Luke has a shorter collection called the Sermon on the Plane!

So, the reporting of the words of Christ are based on impression rather than clearly recollected situations. The individual pericopes are short and pithy enough to suggest that they were memorable, and were remembered almost verbatim, but the original situation was lost, or, just as likely, the sayings were often repeated by Jesus in different situations so were not attached to any particular event. Though situations were lost or did not uniquely exist, the moral sentiments expressed by the pericopes could hardly be mistaken, the words were so economical and memorable. The long entreaties and exhortations in John are fanciful creations of the author.

In some places, Jesus is made to say things that seem prophetic or incongruous in a particular situation. It suits the idea that Jesus was God, just as his supposed miracles do, but it goes against the belief that Christians are expected to hold that Jesus was wholely a man so that he could experience human suffering fully as a man. “A paradox and mystery”, supernaturalists would say, is that he nevertheless remained a God also! It is a circle to be squared by each believer for themselves, but it is certain that men cannot still storms or walk on water, and if we are invited to believe that this man could, then he could not simultaneously have been an ordinary man, and that leaves us doubting that he could suffer as an ordinary man would suffer—on a cross, for example.

However the Christian chooses to square that circle, it is incumbent upon us, in judging the validity of the reporting of his words to doubt the miraculous or prophetic, and that means we must suspect such passages as having been inserted by the much later authors in their own belief that such things must have been said. Generally, though, like miracles, these doubts do not directly effect Jesus’s moral statements. Mainly they are, like his miracles, meant to underline his divinity rather than his humanity, whereas morality is entirely concerned with humanity.

This too is where the historical sequence of the biblical books is important, for the writers were not aiming to write in harmony with whatever others had written. The early church was not a united whole, and the authors of the various gospels and letters wrote at different times and places, intent, where they knew an earlier work, on correcting it and superseding it—as Matthew and Luke attempted to do with Mark, and nearly led to its loss to the world—rather than necessarily harmonizing with it. Thus James, the brother of the Lord, according to Mark 6:3, wrote a passionate letter intended to correct Paul’s aberrations. One might have thought that the brother of the incarnate God and head of the first Church in Jerusalem would have had more authority than any man other than the incarnate God Himself, and much more than one who had never known God in the flesh, but only, by his own admission, in hallucinations. Yet James is universally disparaged, and Paul eulogized by these curious Christians tempted into Antichristianity by the Devil intent on undermining God’s good work.

This latter, at least, is what they should think but do not. Rather they have succumbed to the Devil’s blandishments, look upon the world from a mountain peak and claim it as their own, throw themselves from the pinnacle of the temple confident in their arrogance that God and His angels will save them through their nonsensical “faith alone” belief. All because they listen to Paul, the Antichrist rather than to “every word that procedeth from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). Only in the gospel passages recording those words does the Christian know any words that literally came out of the mouth of God. The brother of the lord, James, must have heard many such words, and understood just what Jesus would have said when he replied to Paul’s distortions, but still Christians hearken to Paul. It is plain from their abandonment of His direct teaching that Christians hate God. The have chosen the Devil and his Antichrist rather than God and Christ.

This Antichrist was, of course, at work only a short while after the crucifixion, and long before the gospels were set down, so his baneful influence is plain in them. Paul, for example, invented the Christian liturgy of the eucharist, which later appeared as if really said by Jesus in the gospels. Previously Jesus had known it as the Messianic Meal, in which he broke bread and shared food in fellowship on several occasions in his recorded life, not least the so-called feeding miracles. Christ emphasized practical morality, while Paul emphasized supernatural mystery and sacraments.

Not that Jesus did not think in supernatural terms, he did. Like all of us, he was a man of his times and could only think in the ways that everyone then thought—in terms of his worldview, the cultural outlook of those with whom he lived. But his morality was hands on. It was applied. It was not airy-fairy fancies, wishful thinking, prayers and promises. Disciples of Jesus had to behave in a prescribed way, as James makes clear. Faith and God were not disregarded for they helped stiffen the believer’s spine and their resolve, but the outcome was to be a Good Samaritan, to be a Christ! Paul has deliberately obfuscated the practical purpose of Christ’s teaching and mode of life.

Angst and Apocalypse

Fundamentalists make the schoolboy error of thinking that the authors of the biblical books could write a universal and eternal way of living when they lived in times and places where particular ethics and attitudes were prevalent because they were the culture of the Jews taught to them all from birth. The emphasis on otherworldliness was a response to the uncertainty in the real world. In a few thousand years, the general certainty and continuity of small group, tribal and village societies had progressively been destroyed by the expansion of empires, which themselves, though mighty were never stable for long, being dependent on militarism, and were disruptive of traditional communal life, and increasingly marginalized the poor.

In the west, the Persian, Greek and then Roman empires subjected their people to an existential angst through the destruction of eternal cultures and lifestyles, especially for the uneducated poor. The withdrawal of people from reality was the result of this persistent tendency. When the contentment that people had enjoyed for millennia had disappeared, or was manifestly disappearing, a strong inclination arose to seek solace in promises of happiness elsewhere. Intelligent and educated people in general did not fall for this temptation. They were not so anxious, having their privileges, and were more reasonable from their education, preferring the philosophical lifestyles of the Stoics and Epicureans, and enjoying the ritual of state occasions. The poor wanted comfort and a promise of something better to reward their fear and anguish in this life. In short, just like today, pessimism about the future was rife.

The Persian religion, Zoroastrianism, of a few centuries before had introduced the idea of a linear as opposed to the natural cyclical view of history. The world was created by a benevolent god, went through several phases akin to the seasons of an annual cycle, and then ended! Thereafter God’s kingdom replaced the previous imperfect world, created perfect by the good God but spoiled by the wicked God. Notionally the wicked God could have been victorious, but the decisions of human beings to oppose him eventually swung the victory the way of the good God—or at least that was the expectation. So people had to choose the good God if the world was to end in a new perfect creation as opposed to destruction by the wicked one.

The era of Jesus was one when many people believed the End was nigh, and the Jewish sect of Essenes, of whom Jesus was certainly one, were convinced of it. Judaism had an eschatological tradition it had received from the Zoroastrian Persians when they set up the Jewish temple state of Yehud. Though the subsequent rulers of Judah, the Greeks and Maccabees, edited from the Jewish scriptures much of the original manifestly Persian apocalyptic content, it remained hovering in Jewish non-canonical tradition, an apocalyptic literature which traditionalists, like the Essenes, revered, and so continued to be influential. This former Zoroastrian tradition was also perpetuated in Gnosticism. Zoroastrianism influenced Christianity by both of these routes.

The pessimism of the age was reflected in the disdain of these eschatological beliefs for the real material world, and the longing some had for it to end in the hope of a perfect world to come, a longing Christians were to keep alive for centuries after Jesus, waiting in the Garden of Gethsemane, expected it that very night.

Rome’s was a grossly unequal empire. Rich families were unbelievably rich while the poor were often luckier if they were slaves. It was also an empire that relied on conquest. It was a military state. Modern capitalism relies on never ending growth of productivity, but then the Roman empire required never ending growth of conquered peoples. But just as productivity growth is getting harder today, conquest was getting harder then. Invincible Roman legions were losing more battles, and the northern tribes driven west and south by the Huns coming from the east were getting harder to contain along the empire’s long northern border. It was a great worry to Romans, rich and poor alike, but some of the poor were beginning to think the end of empire might be no bad thing for them, and they began to welcome each fresh incursion of the barbarians, and each new defeat by the legions. Each disaster hinted at the final one—the End of the World!

The apocalyptic or messianic Jews called “Christiani” and the Gnostic sects had their eschatological theories derived from Zoroastrianism to explain it, and these beliefs were getting increasingly popular. Hidden in them were differences in the notion of what happens at the End. Jewish apocalyptic envisaged the restoration of a pure creation and a new beginning of the real world. Gnostics generally thought the wicked world would be destroyed and souls would then gravitate towards the purely spiritual God in a purely spiritual world. Hellenistic Jews like Paul seem to have crossed the wires, and influenced by Paul, Christianity inclined increasingly towards Gnostic spiritualism, and remains there today.

The apocalyptic Jewish expectation was of a restored world led by pious Jews in a kingdom of God, one of the notions they had from the Persians. The approach to the End Time therefore required Jews to strive to be perfect to be eligible for admission to the future kingdom. Perfection could be had by being lifelong law-abiding Jews, or by sincere repentance of their sins followed by strictly adhering to the law until the kingdom came. That is what Christ taught and John the Baptist before him, and it remains the case for Christians today! The resurrection of Christ into worldly life was the proof that God’s restored creation, His kingdom, was beginning, and all righteous Jews who had died would follow him, resurrected to live in the new world. Matthew describes it as an historical fact.

Gnostics had the idea that the world was wicked because it had not been created by the good God at all, but by the wicked one, a self glorifying lesser god who pretended to be God. The Jewish scriptures said the creator was the God of the Hebrews, so, for Gnostics, He was the wicked god, and they rejected Him. It explained why the Old Testament YHWH was such a bully and a monster. The End came about when the distant and purely spiritual God of All realized that his son, YHWH, had created a sort of slave world, a material non-spiritual world, and he decided to destroy it and all its wickedness. At that moment, though, the souls of the good would be released for them to return whence they came—return to God. As the material world was wicked, and its god was wicked, his prescriptions and commands were also wicked, so people were free to disobey them, and they took up a licentious lifestyle. Others thought quite the opposite. They must reject and disdain everything in the material world, so they rejected sex between fleshly bodies, dressed in rags and ate minimally, living an ascetic life.

In the original Jewish speculation, the rulers of the restored world would be Jews, but Christians altered this belief from Jews to Christians on the grounds that Christians were the new Israel. Of course, the first Christians were all Jews anyway, and the Deuteronomistic theme of Jewish foundation history was that unrighteousness would always reduce Jews to a remnant, whereas righteousness led to their being leaders of the world. So, the first Jewish Christians were Israel, the righteous remnant, and when Christianity spread into the empire amongst Hellenized Jews, like Paul, and then godfearing gentiles, all accepted that the Christians were still the new Israel even though they were no longer all Jews, and eventually none were.

Paul’s Teaching

What then was to be their attitude to the Roman state? Paul, the so-called apostle to the gentiles boasted he was all things to all men (1 Cor 9:22), an opportunist that he might “gain the more”. He taught that sex ought to be disdained (1 Cor 7:29f) and marriage was therefore unnecessary (1  Cor 7:26), but he rebuked Christians that thought as the world was about to end there was no point in working (2 Thess 3:7). In Romans 13:1f, Paul also told his hearers to ignore the forthcoming End, in their relationship with the state, to pay their taxes and to fulfil all their legal requirements, though it all is soon to be rendered pointless. When you are convinced the world is going to end, what is the point of continuing to work? Paul condemned their wish to down tools—strike—until the kingdom come. It suggests he was as cynical as modern US ministers and TV evangelists.

Paul was inconsistent. Rulers ruled with God’s approval (Romans 13:2) and on His behalf. Yet in 1 Cor 6:1, Christians were told not to use Roman legal institutions to settle their disputes. The End was nigh when Christians would rule and judge the world. Meanwhile they had to forgo due process and practise settling their own differences. Paul was the first named Christian opportunist and sophist, ready to argue any line that suited him for the moment. If that is not so, then Paul’s letters must be just compendiums of contradictory letters by different Hellenistic missionaries put together in the name of a single man—Paul.

Whatever and whoever the letters of Paul represent, no attempt is made in them to pretend he is a god. Whatever he says, it is a fallible human opinion. However, Christ in the gospels, Christians should believe, is a manifestation of Almighty God, whose words should carry divine weight. The New Testament shows that the effective deification, or partial deification, of Paul by Christians is an heresy, and an unforgivable distraction from the sacred teachings recorded as coming directly from God’s own lips. Anyone who tries to get a coherent moral message from the New Testament should appreciate that they are asking the impossible. Present day Pauline Christians attempt it by levering God—Christ—into Paul’s mould. To do this they have to ignore most of Christ’s own morality, and have to pretend Christ promised eternal salvation to any criminal—sinner—who professes Christianity. When anyone points to the contradictions, they argue that circumstances have changed. Christ’s morality cannot apply today. Paul’s lack of it, of course, can! Christ was wrong but Paul was right. So, who is the Christian God?

However Christ and Paul are viewed, their teachings were different and a Christianity which claims to be built on both has to be incoherent. No certain moral outlook can be had without accepting that, to be a Christian, the message of Christ must have priority over interpretations of it like Paul’s, and, in all honesty, Paul should be seen not as an interpreter of Christ’s message but a distorter of it. Even so, Paul was aware of the central points of Christ’s teachings, and while aiming to reject the law and substituting faith for works, he ended up nonplussed by his self imposed limitations, and had to prescribe for his hearers alternative rules of appropriate behavior.

Among them was the imitation of Christ, boasting that he himself imitated Christ, and his hearers should too (1 Cor 11:1). The imitation of Christ was a valid Christian teaching, the very reason why any of the life of Christ is remembered at all other than his death. Yet the imitation of Christ today is utterly rejected by all but a few professed Christians. Their excuse is that no mortal being could successfully imitate Christ, a god. Paradoxically, those that venerate Paul in particular, reject his plea that they imitate Christ, or accept it only in that Christ had faith in his God, and that is as far as imitation of Christ need go. The imitation of Christ in this diluted sense is another “do nothing” Christian excuse.

Such Christians claim they have faith, and that is sufficient for salvation. Yet the imitation of Christ requires the Christian to imitate the teaching, deeds and lifestyle of Christ, the central feature of which was love—meaning benevolence, protecting, helping and serving others, and enduring personal slights and criticism in the interest of social harmony rather than seeking revenge. None of the ministry of Jesus had to be laid out if only his faith was important. The gospels describe the life and works of Jesus leading up to his crucifixion so that they can be a model for his disciples, an example of his moral principles in his social activity. Important Christian ethical principles are not just taught by Christ but lived by him, so that those who cannot seem to comprehend his teaching can copy his works. Sadly, Christians ignore Christ in favor of Paul, who was not a convincing imitation of Christ, not least because of his lack of humility.

Moreover, the imitation of Christ was important for the very reason that his new morality was hard to comprehend. Love defied the strong passions like anger and hatred that led to conflict, and people used to being able to display anger and hatred found commands like “love your enemies” and “turn the other cheek” quite impossible to fathom. The life of Christ illustrated them, but Christians complain he cannot have meant it—no one can be perfect like God. So, there is no need even to try. There you are. The Christian proves they have no faith, despite their smug conceit. Do they really think God hasn’t noticed their bit of conjuring? Do they honestly think that God, almighty and omniscient as he is, thinks human beings can be perfect when he urges them to be, knowing that they are necessarily imperfect human beings? If not, what? He expects people to try!

Love, Faith and Omnipotence

The imitation of Christ is their target. No one may ever achieve it, but, in trying their utmost to do it, the Christian demonstrates their faith. There is no faith where there are no works. The expression “justification by faith” is Paul’s, but other New Testament writers have the same idea. Despite the epistle of James, which ought to count for more than it does, too many New Testament authors play down the individual’s role in earning salvation by playing on the supremacy of God’s power. Salvation is God’s gift, given through God’s grace, so human “works” are irrelevant. All they need is faith. Or so their excuse goes.

Well, if faith is entirely God’s to give, why should He be any more influenced by those who have faith than those who do good deeds? If works are irrelevant to God’s choice, then so is faith. The argument is one of God’s omnipotence. God is believed by Christians to be almighty—He can do just what He likes. But as soon as He is constrained to do something by obligation, He can no longer be all powerful! His obligation to save the faithful has destroyed His right to choose not to.

Even the precursors of the Christians, the Essenes, knew this, and Jesus and his brother James were Essenes. They accepted that God could not be constrained, but felt that sinful men’s nature could, through exercising their will to be good, to try to be perfect just as God is perfect. They could aspire to salvation. Yes, God could still reject them, however hard they had tried because God was the sole judge of the matter. But the faith the Essenes had in God was that He was not capricious. He made His judgements honestly, based on the effort people had put into their attempt to live perfectly. He would not arbitrarily or whimsically make a perverse decision, but no one could count on being saved, as many modern—Pauline—Christians do.

The reason is simple—no one can presume to know God’s own precise criteria, except that it is not faith alone! We know explicitly that righteousness was an absolute necessity for entry into God’s kingdom—ie salvation (Matthew 5:6), and that comes directly from God Himself in His human form for all genuine Christians. Where people have been sinners, they had to repent first (Matthew 4:17), then had to do everything Christ commanded (Matthew 28:20). Faith then is the acceptance of Christ’s words and deeds, and obedience to his command to act on them—to do something, namely to love others as you would like to be loved yourself. Faith alone reduces this to nothing—to doing nothing:

The emphasis on God’s indispensable initiative in the work of man’s salvation seems to reduce the importance of moral striving and of independent moral argument. For a central motive in the moral struggle—which gives it bite and seriousness—has apparently been removed. That is the belief that upon success in it, a man’s eternal future depends.

J L Houlden, Ethics of the New Testament, 1973

Only James’s epistle, directed against Hellenizers like Paul, if not Paul himself, is crystal clear that works are what matter (James 2:14-26), but Houlden tries to exonerate Paul, and implies that James was wrong about him, but says Paul accepted that humans were indeed judged by their works:

Each man’s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work which any man has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward.

1 Cor 3:13-14

It sounds closer to the moral teaching of Christ but Paul hastily adds in verse 15 that the man himself “will be saved, but only as through fire”, whatever that last phrase means. It seems that some redactor, perhaps Paul himself, realized the sermon was going beyond the “faith only” teaching and hastily tried to recover by an obfuscation. Paul is meddling with Essenic belief and Christ’s morality that came out of it, and he or the redactor is doing it piecemeal, and therefore not at all coherently.

Pauline Christians like Houlden succeed in reversing the Essenic argument, proving that, even if Paul did make some allowance for practical morality, his backsliding followers did not. Houlden tells his Christian readers that “obedience to God’s fundamental commands is nevertheless futile and harmful, if a man believes that by it he can command God’s approval”. It is the typical “God is an idiot” Christian argument. He slips in the conditional statement, a statement that could not apply to anyone who is a proper Christian, for any such person knows that an almighty God cannot be commanded by anyone who is not “almighty”. Once this silly conditional clause is omitted we are left with:

Obedience to God’s fundamental commands is nevertheless futile and harmful.

Plainly, that has to be wrong for anyone who has faith in God. Why would an almighty and all knowing God issue commands to his acolytes when there is no way they can achieve God’s approval by obeying them? It is nonsense, and satanic nonsense, to any believer. It is saying, “Do not believe God, do not follow His commands, but instead stick to what Paul told you”! Then supposing you decided on doing this, you find that Paul is telling you that faith alone is the essential for salvation, and indeed by faith alone you can command God’s approval. Paul says God has promised salvation by faith alone, and so most Pauline Christians are convinced that God has no option but to save them because of their self proclaimed faith.

In fact, the Christian certainly does achieve God’s approval by following His commands—by pursuing the practical moral living that He advocated, nay commanded, to His followers through His earthly lips! God was Christ is the fundamental tenet of Christianity. What the Christian does not get, even by following every commandment as well as they possibly can, is certain salvation. Only foolish Pauline Christians are so foolish as to believe they can. Only they are bold enough to go around bragging they are saved. Salvation is God’s gift. Only He can decide it. No one can presume they know what He will decide, for then they are more mighty than God. God is doing what they have decided! This again is the “God is an idiot” principle that Paul invented to suit himself. It is certainly wrong because the Christian is supposed to believe what Christ said, for he is the one they believe is God. One of the things Christ said several times is that the Christian must be humble. It is not humble to tell God that you will be saved—“the first will be last”, according to Jesus (Mark 9:35; 10:31; Matthew 19:30; 20:16; Luke 13:30).

How then can Pauline Christians expect to have God’s favor and grace when they boast that they are saved simply because they announce they are Christians. They are meant to know that salvation depends ultimately on God’s grace, and that cannot be assumed whatever they do. So all of those who assume it, believing their lying pastors are as likely to be lost as saved because they have not done the basics properly. They claim to have faith, but only works can demonstrate it, and boasting is not a sign of humility.

Houlden, typically satanic, says Paulinism takes the “all too common self concern out of the moral struggle”. Yet, if morals are important at all, self concern is essential. People have to be concerned that they are being morally correct. That is the point! Paulinism takes all concern about moral struggle from the hope for salvation because Paul offers it as the fool’s reward for doing nothing. Christ required works. “Works” means doing what is right. Doing what is right is what makes one righteous, and righteousness is what saves! By adopting the wonderfully easy “do nothing” approach to salvation, the quack evangelist, Paul, and all his quack successors, got easy converts and riches off the back of it. Evangelists have been doing it ever since, and are often most successful in periods of anxiety.

People in the Roman world were chafed at the state of the world then, and have been often since, but Christianity is a poor ointment for it. Following the way of Christ is not easy, so, as an ointment for angst, it is expensive. The way to God, all Christians should know because Christ himself taught it, is much harder then the way to hell. So why would anyone imagine that an easy path, like Paul’s, is anything but a path to hell?

The message of Christ is all the more important in hard times. It remains love others, help them, and be kind to each other—a practical, simple, and eternal morality, all the more important in hard times, difficult, yes, but Jesus did not try to hide it, as Paul did. It means making an effort, and that is what merits the reward. What Christians count as salvation is found in the life and good works they do towards other people in our human societies.

If only otherworldly things mattered, love itself would be pointless. That is perhaps why so few Christians actually love others, other than close relatives and some friends. Christ substituted the general principle of love of others for the whole of the Jewish law. It was its fulfilment, and Paul shows he knew something of Christ’s teaching of love when he writes:

Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means. On the contrary, we uphold the law.

Romans 3:31

In leading up to this Paul ties himself, and Christian commentators, in knots. He says there is no distinction between faith in Jesus and the law, then proceeds to find one—faith in Jesus is superior because it expiates or propitiates sin! God does it even though human beings are sinners because He is just! He always wanted to forgive humans their sins, but He couldn’t do it! He could only be forbearing, but now He could do what he always wanted to do, and could make anyone righteous, even though they had consistently sinned and deserved no forgiveness, merely through their faith in Jesus. It is, Paul says, all that a monotheistic God can do, and it is entirely in line with the Jewish law.

“Paulianity” as a Mystery Religion

Paul plainly sets himself up as a new god with his novel dying and rising mystery religion—his new take on Attis. The whole argument simply to abolish good works as a criterion of God’s favorable judgement, and to substitute empty faith:

We hold a man is justified by faith apart from works of the law.

Romans 3:28

But again, how can anyone have faith in Jesus as God incarnate and ignore what the incarnated God said during his incarnation, believing instead an ordinary man who said something not only different but contradictory? Faith alone is impossible, a contradiction—it must necessitate faith in what Jesus taught above what Paul taught, and Jesus taught good deeds were necessary, for at Judgement Day God would separate the sheep from the goats. How can He do that when they are all sheep, because He has forgiven every sinner however wicked their sins?

All of the good qualities cited as desirable by Jesus, such as the list of beatitudes in Matthew 5, are earthly qualities. Those who have them, those who are kind, peaceful, lawful, tolerant, satisfied with little, merciful, and so on, are ideal partners in the ideal community—on earth! That would be the community of the future—the Christian community. So, these qualities are this worldly, not other worldly. These characteristics stem from our social instincts, instincts necessary in a stable and harmonious society, one such that God would want to see.

If God was interested only in the other world, then what was His overwhelming need to create this one? If Jesus was interested only in the other world then why did he preach as he did that people should have all these this worldly qualities? Even those prepared to give a cup of water to Christians would be rewarded (Mark 9:41), so how can more significant good deeds be without reward in the Pauline fabrication? The aim is utterly practical, utterly of this world. Are there cups of water in heaven? Loving others is a question of will. We don’t have to do it, and increasingly people have not been, especially in the higher echelons of society.

Heaven may be a place where everybody loves everyone else, and God, being almighty, could instantly sift the wheat and the chaff and then destroy the world with the chaff in it, leaving everyone with loving souls in heaven. It would have the benefit of instantly eliminating the farce of faith. But God is an idiot, as all Pauline Christians assume. God as Jesus advocated love and the practical qualities that he blessed. If faith is all that matters to God, then why love, and why preach beatitudes? If love is the essential glue between people that makes a successful society, the point of Christian morality is social not spiritual, unless “spiritual” is another word for beneficial or good.

It all seems obvious, but Paul was intent on mystifying Christ’s simple message. For him the virtues of this world, socially benevolent virtues, were downgraded below the mystical thinking that links Paul with the dying and rising gods, and the Gnostics. Paul’s writings, profound and high minded as Christians regard them, are a mishmash. Few of them are single intact letters, indeed it is unlikely they were letters despite their name and the form they take. Just as Paul may be a generic Hellenistic missionary compounded of several of them with views at odds with the Jerusalem Church, his letters are made up of extracts and fragments of a mixture of sources, some closer to Christ and James than others.

If Paul was one man, he was incoherent, if several, then different points of view are being attributed falsely to one man. Yet, it adds to the mystique of the biblical Paul because the work attributed to him is incoherent, and when writings are hard to understand, they are not infrequently considered deep. Anyway, while the elevation of faith as a magical mystical medicine for sin is uppermost in Paul’s varied works, as is evident from the Pauline Christianity that came to dominate the western world, there are significant passages that fit uncomfortably with it, and sound closer to the Christianity of Christ. In 1 Corinthians 13:1-14:1, Paul waxes lyrical about love in preparation for extolling the insanity of speaking in tongues:

Love is patient and kind, love is not envious, love is not vain or boastful, it is not rude, it has no hidden agenda, it is not resentful or wicked in intent, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices in righteousness and truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends… So faith, hope, and love abide, these three things, but the greatest of these is love. Make it your aim to love…

1 Cor 13:4-8; 13:13-14:1

It is as if a true follower of Christ had interpolated this passage, cleverly melding it into a nonsensical Pauline passage about “prophecy” and speaking in tongues to restore love to the principle virtue in spite of Paul! Similarly, in Philippians 2:1-11, if Paul is the author, he extols humility, just as Christ did. Paul rarely seemed humble. He was mostly full of himself, boastful, and in your face, whereas humility was Jesus’s natural garment, at least in the three synoptic gospels, which are earlier and likely to be more authentic. Today, Christians as a whole, especially in the USA, model themselves on Paul—they are anything but humble. They are bombastic, smug and boastful in their utter ignorance, with few exceptions.

Paul advocated the magic salve of a mystery religion, and Christians who follow him love it, but it does not cure anything, and it does not entitle them to use the name Christian. They are Paulians not Christians, and their religion is Paulianity not Christianity. The have faith but no love, except of themselves, and, as we saw, even Paul, nominally at least, admitted love was the greater. If Paul has not been confused by later cutting and pasting, he is confused and incoherent in his own right. Even though the words of Christ were recorded a generation or more after his crucifixion, his argument is largely consistent, and the few apparent contradictions are obvious interpolations by the bishops of the gentile church, in which he either denies Judaism or pronounces his aim of setting up a new religion, both of which do not fit in with his belief that the world was about to end. The clergy are aware of these interpolations, having been taught them at seminary by biblical scholars, but they are not often willing to pass on the information to their congregations for fear of losing them. They want to keep their platters full, so they do not want to startle the sheep.

The End of Time

God is, for any Christian, real or so-called, Christ, and Christ not Paul speaks with the authority of God. Once a Christian is wise enough to recognize at least the obvious additions, they can get a good idea of Christ’s practical, this worldly morality—the way that Christians were intended to imitate Christ, and as he taught, try to be perfect like God. Yet how many Christians do this? They do the opposite with their excuse that it is an impossible task to be perfect like God. The Christian never has any trouble in contradicting the inerrant bible and trumping God when they want to. Only an idiot God could imagine human beings so perfect, He cannot have meant it, so they can forget it. Surely, for any Godfearing Christian, God is the perfect judge. He can tell those who are seriously trying to be perfect as He directed from those who make feeble and demeaning excuses for not trying, while still expecting the supreme being they are glibly insulting to save them.

Jesus was expecting the End. He believed the archangel Michael and his host of angels would burst from the Mount of Olives on the night of the vigil in the Garden of Gethsemane. He taught repentance—sincerely confessing and regretting past sins, and determining thereafter to remain free of sin until kingdom come. Instead of sinning, they were to love others, to treat them with kindness and mercy, to care for them and help them in difficulties. What is the point of all that if Paul’s was the correct Christian teaching?

Jesus was wrong about the angelic host. It never came, and Jesus resigned himself to die as a false prophet as Deuteronomy prescribed, perhaps expecting his armed followers to behead him. Instead he was arrested and crucified, probably having instead arranged, in the event of the Heavenly Armies failing to arrive, for Judas to show the guards where and who he was. Christians always know God’s plan, or what they are told by others equally ignorant, is God’s plan. If there is any such thing, Jesus believed it was to be the Judgement Day, that very day he was in the Garden of Gethsemane.

The End has still not come 2000 years later, but, if God’s plan is what the incarnation of God taught, it was that Christians should aim to be Christs, moral leaders spreading the practical morality of love, as long as the End has not come. Only that could have been God’s real plan. An almighty being could have ended the world there and then in the supernatural defeat of evil, as Jesus expected. He did not do it. What He did was to appear on earth and say with absolute clarity, in His own words, what good people, Christians, were to do. They did not do it! His plan was foiled. It failed as soon as Paul got to the Hellenized Jews and gentiles, enamored of eastern mysteries, with his do-nothing message of faith instead of Christ’s message of love. So far few people have noticed the substitution.

Love is in fact essential among humans who want to live in harmony. Love is a vital feature of society—we live together precisely so that we can give and receive help, protection and care from other people. Love is not a short term measure to secure righteousness before Judgement Day, it is how we live together at all.

Christianity as a mass movement never followed the ethics of Christ, even though he was considered to have been the only God of the universe materialized in a human form. The bible shows that Paul, never one of the Twelve, took up the running, denigrated the original apostles, changed the morality of Christians from that of the Jerusalem Church—led by James who wrote against Paul’s unilateral changes—and thereby found an easy route into the Hellenistic world of Rome. Paul, we are told hailed from Tarsus in Asia Minor, a place where the dying and rising god, Attis, was popularly revered—under the name Sandan, who was likened to Herakles, according to Dio Chrysostom. Paul, at the crossing of the Jewish and Hellenistic cultures saw Christ as Attis. While some of the central messages of Christ were known among some Hellenized Jews, Paul could not completely ignore them in building his new cult, but he was able to change the emphasis from the original message of love and frugality to the confidence trick of faith by normally putting love lower down his hierarchy of virtues than faith.

The Roman Milieu

Once Christianity had become an item in the Roman world, it was subject to all the traditions and habits within it. Stoicism was popular among educated people, and, as the Christian bishops aspired to greater respectability, aspired to attract other than slaves and the underclasses, having abandoned love as little more than a Christian idiosyncrasy symbolized as a somewhat debauched feast, they turned to stoical values for their morality. Stoicism was “an ethic of human brotherhood and self fulfilment”, and so was caring and tolerant. It was not a religion per se but a world outlook or a practical philosophy of life—much as Jesus had taught in his practical morality—and was indifferent to religions, although it tolerated them while offering practical ways of withstanding the slings and arrows of fortune—the vicissitudes of life.

Christianity, like Judaism, because of its intolerance, and because Romans knew of its Jewish and anti-Roman roots, was unpopular among patriotic Romans. This unpopularity has been mythologized into continuous persecution, though, Christians were only persecuted occasionally by emperors who saw the threat it offered to Roman civic traditions—which Christians abhorred—and so to Rome itself. The spread of Christianity is a warning that intolerance ultimately trumps toleration. Romans were broadly tolerant of religions, Christians were not. Some Romans saw the danger but attempts to purge the danger were too late and ineffective. Today in the USA, Christians so-called have the same fears of Moslem intolerance. So they know how the patriotic Roman felt about the growth of their own religion in the first three centuries.

Educated Romans found religious intolerance difficult, and despite popular patriotic intolerance of Christianity’s hatred of Roman civic institutions, it was able to spread in the legal milieu of the magistrates courts, a milieu the gospels themselves illustrate in their (false) depiction of Pontius Pilate as himself tolerant of Christ. Toleration was not the issue in this case, nor was it possible. Though Jesus is popularly depicted as an innocent holy teacher, the Romans obviously thought otherwise. He had been acclaimed a king, and had accepted the acclamation. That is why he was labeled on the cross as “The king of the Jews”. Pilate could not be tolerant of a rival to Caesar without himself seeming a traitor. But in the time of the “persecutions”, Roman magistrates tried their utmost to prevent ecstatic and unstable Christians from committing themselves to martyrdom. Even though they were not sympathetic to the over enthusiasm of those appearing before them, the magistrates were reluctant to let them be martyrs.

Meanwhile, Christianity was melding slowly and subtly with Roman culture. Converts could not instantly lose their habits of a lifetime, so the Christian message was recast in local idioms, and eventually the whole bible appeared in Latin. Popular social habits of the time came to be considered Christian—clerics still dress in late Roman gear. Scholars have quite properly spoken not of the conversion of Rome to Christianity, but of the conversion of Christianity to Rome. Later that became an issue for Protestants who accused Catholics of not being Christians, yet the Protestants had only one model of Christianity before them, the Catholic religion, from which they had split, so they retained much of the accumulated ways of Catholicism, objecting mainly to grandeur in church decoration, the Latin bible, and the power of the Divines of the Catholic Church.

Thus, the original architect of the Antichristian Church, Paul, Protestants revered even more than the Catholics did. They did not abandon faith for love as they should have, but made even more of faith, and once the bible had been translated into the vernacular, they idolized it too. The conversion of Christianity was completed by Paul and the bishops accepting the status quo, the emperor, civic religion, unbelievable wealth, slavery, the subordination of women, and the Roman state as a military state. Christianity had been converted.

In practical terms, Jesus Christ was a rebel, and that is why many Romans could not accept Christianity in its first few hundred years. Whether the reader of the gospels sees a rival to Caesar or a religious leader, Christ’s doctrines were revolutionary and outstandingly moral. His idea of substituting the complexities of the law of Moses with the simple criterion of love was both natural and rebellious, and still remains so. Love is a natural human instinct which ought to be properly cultivated, but human society, not least Jewish society, had replaced love with law, replaced a natural instinct with social coercion. Social and evolutionary biology show both are necessary, but with the law as a reminder to free riders that no one can take advantage of natural kindness.

Paul and “Paulianity”

Some people have seen Paul not as an apostle of Christ, but a man setting himself up as a prophet and to found a new religion. He began his career persecuting the first followers of Christ, according to Acts of the Apostles, and was involved in the murder of Stephen. Allegedly he had a remarkable conversion to the Christianity he had been harassing, but then spent his career preaching a different gospel from Christ’s, and it is his gospel that most Christians now believe. Christ had an admirably simple, easy to understand and applicable message of love, humility and frugality, and Paul echoes it in part because too many of his contemporaries, Hellenized Jews, had a good idea of what Christ taught, especially as they would have recognized him as an Essene.

Yet Paul emphasized quite different things, beginning by mystifying the practical principles. He substituted faith for love and virtue, then had them reappear as mysterious symptoms of faith and “the spirit”, not something to be done explicitly because they were what pleased God. Nowhere does Paul use Christ’s argument that God is in everyone just as He was in Christ himself as a reason for people to love others, be kind and to do no harm. Rather he mystifies it by reversing it to we are all in God, something which Christ said required sincere repentance and a sinless life thereafter!

Paul does sometimes argue that Christians should imitate Christ, and he sometimes give moral examples that spring from Christ’s precepts without saying so, or explaining them as examples of one of Christ’s principles. Love, frugality and humility, practised communally necessitate an economic equality, which the apostles in Acts exemplify, and so too did the Essenes, an important point of contact. Paul advocates equality of wealth in his pleas for gifts, ostensibly for the saints in Jerusalem, but from which he took his due like any publican. Equality for others eventually made Paul a rich man. What had been considered proper because it was done by Christ, under Paul became the duties of those who were members of a church, a much feebler motive. The wish to imitate Christ is a more positive and personal motive than to have imposed duties as a church member. Christ, as the fount and origin of the Church, must be a more incisive motivation than the institution that sprang from his teaching.

Paul made apparent allusions to the teaching of Jesus without the clarity of the original. So some scholars deny that Paul had ever known Christ’s message at first hand, so built up his own around what little he did know of it. Most Christians will not hear that Paul taught anything different from Jesus, but rather was appointed by God as the apostle to the gentiles, to make Christ’s message clear to the world. None of them can bear to imagine he could have been Satan’s apostle appointed to negate God’s moral activities, just as Ahriman always negated the intentions of Ahuramazda in Zoroastrianism. The Christian Ahriman is Satan, the Devil.

Paul makes Christ’s death a saving mystery, illogical and fantastic, but the core of his “faith”, a compulsory belief for those who fretted about life after death. Christ—following the original Persian tradition that every one of us has a personal battle to win if the cosmic war is to end in victory—taught the simple secret of human morality—love. Paul confused it. When something is crystal clear, expressed in a single word, elaborate descriptions and explanations ought not to be needed. To do so is confusing because it is heading back to whence the need for the single word came—the confusion of the law of Moses which was repeatedly elaborated until only scholars could comprehend it. Paul abolishes the law without emphasizing the one word replacement for it. Consequently, he has to keep reiterating blocks of legal obligations and rules of conduct for Christians to learn (Col 3:5-4:1, and elsewhere often, if not at such length).

It cannot be repeated often enough, to counter Paul’s obfuscation, that love is not an empty symbol of an unattainable goal, or one only attainable after death. If Christians truly believe Christ is God, they must hear and do what he taught and did, accepting that God’s commands are not optional. Imagine that human nature could be nothing but loving and caring. Society would be perfect. That is the point and the purpose of Christ’s teaching, the purpose of love. It solved the problems of society—selfishness. Paul ruins it. He reinstates selfishness as personal salvation through faith. Love becomes merely a symptom of good faith, and faith requires no effort because it is readily available to anyone who agrees with the magical claim that the crucifixion of Christ absolved everyone from sin. Hitler’s insane ambition led to the death of 55 million people, but he was a faithful Christian—he had faith “in the cross”, as Paul would put it, so he was as sinless as a new born babe. Hitler was a lifelong Catholic baptized “into Christ”, as another Pauline magical formula would have it, equating with complete forgiveness through “a vital union with Christ”—that is, for nothing more than being a Christian.

Paul tortuously (Romans 4:1-8) invokes the faith of Abraham and the Psalms of David to prove that faith removes the need for works, contrary to everything that Christ said. It is phony and hogwash. Psalms 32, the start of which Paul cites (Romans 4:7-8) is explicitly referring to those who repent of their sins and ask forgiveness, as the rest of the psalm makes clear. Trust or faith in God is required, but it is not faith that God is an idiot! It is faith that He is willing to forgive genuine repentance. No repentance is sincere or genuine when the next day the penitent has to repent again! Sincere repentance is marked by a determination not to sin again, and any such sin proves it was not sincere. Christ was so concerned that his hearers did not take this seriously that he told them it was better to pluck out an eye rather than allow it to lead its owner into sin again, having repented. Yet today, millions of Christians so-called betray their false Pauline beliefs by boasting on the internet that they often have to repent and be forgiven, and Catholics have made an institution of it in the confession.

Criteria of Judgement

Repentance is remorse, regret for wrongdoing, compunction, and an appreciation of the misery caused to others. If that is sincere, it is final, and life thereafter is dedicated to the love and service of others, not teasing, taunting, tricking, robbing and exploiting them. Continual repentance and forgiveness is a meaningless routine that assumes the idiot God and serves only the priests or pastors of one’s chosen church. It is not loving others, but loving yourself. Repentance has to be sincere. You have to be genuinely sorry to mean it. Jesus believed the day of Judgement was not far off, that it could arrive at any time, like a thief in the night appearing without warning, so, unless repentance was accompanied by a determination to be righteous from then on, the least sin could exclude the sinner from the kingdom of God.

In fact, the kingdom was yet far off, and in less fraught times people had time to amend for their minor or inadvertent sins by doing good to counterbalance them. Judgement, according to Revelation 20:12, and the older Zoroastrian religion of the Persians, depended upon a balance sheet of good and bad deeds in each person’s Book of Life—proof again from the New Testament that faith alone is nonsense in Christian belief. Repentance, Christians should believe from Jesus and John the Baptist, discounted ones previous sins, as long as they did not begin again to fill their Book of Life with new ones. Jesus was effectively saying you have one chance of repentance, but no more. If you are not sincere and sin again, then you have had it.

Of course, no one is privy to God’s detailed criteria of Judgement, but the balance of one’s good and bad deeds have to be favorable, either by living a good life or by repenting of one’s bad deeds and thereafter leading a good life. The believer therefore ought to be cautious. If they really fear hell fire, they ought not to believe Paul’s blandishment that faith is sufficient to absolve them of all sin, however gross. Jesus emphatically did not teach it. He taught that the gate to hell was wide. It was the gate to heaven that was narrow. How does that tie in with the Paul’s easy path through faith?

Paul was using Christ, and so could not ignore what people had heard of him and his teaching from other sources. Paul could not just ignore Christ’s lesson of love, so he did not but subverted it with the supposedly more important virtue of faith. The virtues urged by Christ as a matter of will and regard for other people, Paul reduced to mere symptoms of faith, magically imbued by it. So modern Pauline Christians are concerned only with their faith, ignoring that, even on Paul’s criterion, it necessitated love of others, and additional virtues like humility, generosity and frugality. It follows that the absence of any of these virtues signifies the absence of faith! Paulians prefer to believe that baptism “into Christ”, and the consequent membership of “Christ’s body”, the Church, spiritually, magically or miraculously made them moral enough for admission to God’s kingdom. There is nothing hard in that! Christ had made it plain, though, that it was hard. Yet Paul admits that the supposed magic of faith was insufficient—a personal effort of will was necessary too. In Galatians 5:25, the magical influence of the spirit was evidently failing. Paul urged:

If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit.

So, his converts were unable to rely on faith alone to “walk by the Spirit”—they had to be urged by Paul to make an effort to do it. Doing good equates with “works”! Similarly faith alone is insufficient in Colossians 3:5-6, where Christians have to “put to death what is earthly in them”, for “the wrath of God is coming upon the sons of disobedience”. Paul then goes on to list the vices that Christians had to “put away”, among them covetousness, malice, and lying, while “putting on” as God’s chosen ones compassion, kindness, meekness, forgiveness and, “above all these love which binds everything together in perfect harmony”.

Christ patiently taught that love was the one single action to live by, because it subsumes all the other virtues and eliminates the vices. Love, however, in the face of the many people, many of them Christians, who are intolerant, ill mannered, greedy, obnoxious and self-serving requires continuous effort. Christian love has served its purpose only when it is habitual in everybody. Until then Christians were meant to show the way by serving others with kindness and mercy. It does not come by any effort of God, by miracles or magic, but by the hard work of being a Christ! The theology of Christ, as opposed to that of Christianity, was that this effort was necessary to earn God’s reward, even if it was not sufficient—God having the final say. The reward was always in the gift of God, but Jesus taught clearly that failure to do good meant elimination from any further consideration.

It is true that, unlike fundamentalists, we allow for failures of transcription, transmission and translation whenever we consider the gospels accounts of Jesus and his teaching, or the letters which purport to be from the hand of Paul. But knowing the Pauline distortion of the church as it turned out, and comparing it with the narrative of Jesus, knowing now, with reasonable certainty, his historical circumstances, it is easier to see passages purportedly concerning Jesus that must be interpolated or gravely distorted. Many of the supposed miracles are parables misunderstood or deliberately changed. Paul has to contend primarily with himself. He is too consistently inconsistent for it to make sense as deliberate redacting.

An important reason for his inconsistency is that he could not decide what he was doing—telling people how to be saved, or telling people how to behave as citizens of the societies in which they lived. For Christ, the two were one. He expected the apocalypse soon, and that was what was important personally and socially. Paul found that too demanding. He wanted to build up a following by teaching something similar to that which Christ had taught, but he found that his converts were abandoning normal life because the End was nigh, and that did not suit him. Like modern pastors, he needed the donations, so did not want a load of people entirely living on hand outs of bread, having given up working. So, despite the forthcoming End, his followers had to remain good Romans. Moreover, faith was a lot easier to get people committed to whereas love was another matter.

Sexuality

Paul’s main concern always was sexual. He was more fanatically concerned that Christians should forgo sex than any other sin they might commit. It is the reason Christianity has been obsessed with sex, particularly with avoiding it. Christ was much more easy going. If people married then they were to cleave together as one, and divorce was adultery, but for some men, those who could receive it, chastity and celibacy were the ideal (Matthew 19:11-12). The source of this is plainly Essene.

Leading Essenes, those who could receive it, were chaste and celibate, but besides these were married Essenes. If the evidence is read correctly, Paul tried to become an Essene, serving as a novice for three years, but failing to be accepted as an initiate. Nevertheless the requirement of chastity seems to have impressed him so much that he took it as preferable for his own converts. From the Essene writings, the objective of it was to be as close to the angels as possible, angels not being sexual creatures. Immortality excludes any need for sex, or therefore, sexual organs, and so these people chose to be chaste (“make themselves eunuchs”) “for the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 19:12). It adds to the evidence that Christ was an Essene. The Galli, the priests of Magna Mater, actually castrated themselves, as did the Christian intellectual, Origen, so it is not impossible that Christ and the leading Essenes did too.

In any event, Christians followed Paul in preferring chastity, but often water down the need for it. J Hurd (The Origin of 1 Corinthians, 1965) argued that Paul retreated from a strict position to much more conventionally acceptable ones on several issues, including marriage, all part of making his message more user friendly. 1 Thessalonians 4:7 shows that Paul considered sex unclean, perhaps his reason for preferring chastity. Moreover, lust might interfere with the mutual love of the brethren (1 Thessalonians 4:9). Remember too that despite his appellation, “Apostle to the Gentiles”, Paul concerned himself initially with Hellenized diaspora Jews and Godfearers. Much of his argument is directed against the strictness of the law, which was irrelevant to gentiles, except those few who followed the Noachide law—Godfearers. Christ wanted to fulfil the law through love of others, but Paul wanted to abolish it in favor of faith. Paul knows that Christ had not abolished the law, writing:

Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.

Galatians 6:2

Love, more explicitly, lovingkindness, is precisely “bearing one another’s burdens”—works again! Obedience to law is necessary for social harmony, but, for Christ, love does it. Paul wanted freedom from the Mosaic law, but then has to give lists of things to do and not to do, confusing the utter simplicity of Christ’s law. It is hardly surprising that Paul’s converts in Corinth, rich in faith as they no doubt were, had interpreted the Pauline law as “all things are lawful to me” as a Christian, and were acting with complete immorality, doubtless much of it sexual.

Paul did not deny the Corinthian Christians’ slogan, merely saying, “not all things are helpful”, and “I will not be enslaved by anything”, then belatedly reminded them (1 Corinthians 10:24) that Christians were meant to seek the good of their neighbors not their own. At 1 Corinthians 11:1, he tells them to imitate him—Paul—to take him as their model just as he imitates Christ. Christ would have cut through all this confusion with his own succinct law—love others as if they might be God Himself incarnate—as if any one of them were Christ. Perhaps, he would have reminded them too that repentance for their sins followed by a sinless life until the End or their own death was necessary if not sufficient for salvation. Paul taught that they were already saved, so that:

When Christ who is our own life appears, then you will appear with him in glory.

Colossians 3:4

They will? Then they must have sincerely repented and remained sinless thereafter. Why then does Paul have to urge these converts to “put away” that litany of vices, and instead “put on” that litany of virtues (Colossians 3:5-15)? Is it any wonder that illiterate and semi literate people today are confused and themselves remain anything but ideal humans while boasting their Christianity and their presumed salvation? For Paul, professing Christianity saved them. To profess Christianity is to have faith! Paul could not deny that “all things are lawful” because it was the logic of his “faith alone” dogma.

Love the Greatest Virtue

Of the list of virtues Paul urged his converts to adopt, even though they were free of the law, love was prime!

Now faith, hope, and love, these three things remain; but the greatest of these is love.

1 Cor 13:13

Owe no man any thing, but to love one another, for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law.

Rom 13:8

For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty, only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this—Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

Gal 5:13-14

So, Paul is at this point teaching a confused form of Christ’s morality. Here he says love is prime yet he teaches in general that faith is prime. Love saves for Christ, but faith saves for Paul. Which of these requires the least change of lifestyle and the least effort, for that one will succeed the more easily given that people want to live when they are dead? It was not Christ’s morality. Paul won over the gentile church with his easy option. Jewish Christians gave up their Judaism to become gentiles or they retained their Judaism and left the gentile church which otherwise began to fill quickly with gentiles whom other religions would not accept, including many women.

In Galatians 5:6, Paul explicitly says faith works through love for everyone, Jew or gentile!

For in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision, but faith which worketh by love.

Gal 5:6

He is accepting the argument presented by James in his single epistle in which he defends works against faith. Faith alone is dead, James wrote. Faith requires works of love, so it is indeed love which is the essence of salvation for the Christian, yet modern Christians, especially those Protestants influenced by Luther who disregarded the epistle of James, persist in exalting faith as the mystical key to salvation, instead of love, the practical key taught by Christ. Faith necessarily gives rise to love, these preachers hold, against all the evidence before their eyes. Love was Jesus’s cure for the dissension in society, yet modern societies are riven by dissension, greed, anxiety, and suspicion.

Love is reciprocal. It is meant to be returned, and more than 80 percent of us are ready to return it. So love is like magnetism, it transmits to others until we all line up in social harmony, and in Christian belief, those who try to do it are the ones who are rewarded. That small fraction of less than 20 percent—psychological studies show it exists—are more ready to do what their peers are doing, so when their peers are being mutually helpful and are not trying to cheat others, they will incline that way, but when they see others getting away with greed and trickery, they do the same. Of course, when they persist in being selfish and unloving towards others, then they are giving up their chance of Christian salvation. The punishment of hell fire is aimed at persuading these backsliders to come into the fold, as Christ would put it. Then, like the Lost Sheep and the Prodigal Son, they will be forgiven and will have the same reward as everyone else—eternal life.

Faith then is trust that God will reward those who love others, and punish those who do not. Whoever gets the reward and the punishment is entirely up to God—they are in His gift, according to Christian belief, but the qualifying criteria have been clearly laid out by Christ. Faith is confidence that God will judge fairly! It does not equate with confidence that anyone is automatically saved. Good deeds are necessary for that.

Meanwhile social disapproval may be used to put pressure upon those who not only refuse to care for others but take pleasure in harming them, providing that such disapproval does not extend to persecution of whole sections of society. That would not be love. Some few might be incapable of anything but self love, but that is an illness for diagnosis. Some few might prefer a life of crime, and again, if their habits are persistent then separation from society might be necessary for society’s protection. But essentially as social human beings the large majority of us have a social instinct which makes love a dominant trait of behavior in us. So care is needed in making an example of those who seem not to show it.

Christ’s moral code urges us not to judge others, lest we be judged ourselves, and the reason is plain, it is all too easy for us to judge people wrongly, and it is even easier for us to get caught up in a mass hysteria against one or a group of our fellow humans. Today, it is used by the media to sell newspapers, and to influence people to take political stands based on hatred. We are not to do it, according to Christ, and when society has to do it to protect itself, it needs to take care to have the proper evidence. That is “Due Process”.

Paul cannot make up his mind whether he is instructing his converts in a new ethic based on love rather than law, or whether they should still follow the conventional rules and manners he gave them. He himself has no faith that love of others is sufficient, and continues to itemize virtues, not distinctly Christian ones, like the aforementioned list at Colossians 3:18-4:6. He veers between the two extremes in his inconsistent way, making some scholars doubt that all the letters attributed to Paul are actually his, and even that the letters themselves are not from a single author but are compilations of several early Christian authors by a later redactor. Ultimately Paul sold Christianity not as a moral system but as an eastern mystery.

The new believers took their initiation ceremony as a rebirth into a new life, but the notion of being “born again” is unlikely to have originated in Christianity. The new life ideally was a moral life, but there was little pressure other than exhortation to make it so. Christ made love of others central to the idea of salvation. God offered it as a reward for love, but Paul negated it, while seeming to preach what Christ had said. Paul’s new life was one in which the sinner was reconciled with God, but no reconciliation was possible while the sinner continued to sin, and both Christ and John the Baptist were unequivocal about it. Modern Christians seem to think heaven is full of sinners, blurred by the smoke and mirrors of faith to look like saints. The perfect place is full of sham perfect souls!

Even in his attitude to the Mosaic law, Paul considers it at core not related to behavior or morality. The Jewish law, he thinks was prescribed by God to delineate how Jews should relate to Him. The moral prescriptions of the law are only secondary. It is akin to his preference of faith—a relationship with God—over works of lovingkindness. Yet, if Paul is right, God still prescribed moral behavior as the measure of relatedness with Him. That is no minor point. By obeying the law, Jews behaved according to God’s will, they behaved in the way He prescribed—morally—so that they could relate properly with the supremely moral being! Jesus substituted love of others as the most succinct expression of the law, thus fulfilling it, and thereby proving in acts of love that humanity respected God’s will.

These are the plain and simple interpretations of God’s intentions given the Christian’s acceptance that the bible expresses God’s will. Paul and his successors reject them. God, according to the Torah, gave the law to the Jews via Moses, but Paul thought it was flawed. Its moral purpose, Paul thought, detracted from its true purpose of building a relationship between humanity and God. God was wrong to make morality the center of His relationship with mankind. Paul is arrogant enough to correct God! Paul did not want mere morality to have that role. So, he substituted faith. Morals only matter through faith, according to Paul, completely missing, if that is so, that God had set moral measures for faith! Jesus understood it thus, and so too did James, yet Paul prevailed. The easy Antichristian beliefs triumphed to rule Christianity, as it is erroneously called.

For all that Paul disdains the law as a valid bridge to God, we saw that he nevertheless lists moral virtues that Christians should adopt, but he has no adequate general principle for selecting which Old Testament commandments remained valid and which did not. It seems arbitrary, and has left a terrible legacy. Modern Antichristians—most modern Christians—select whatever Old Testament ordinances that suit their own prejudices, while ignoring adjacent commandments that do not suit their own sins. More particularly, they ignore Christ’s own law which eliminates the old Mosaic law by fulfilling it! Anyone who has read the gospels just applies Christ’s law of lovingkindness to determine what is right and what is wrong. Paul confuses this with his own confusion compounded by his arrogance. The truth is that Paul effectively abrogated the law in favor of faith, whereas Jesus believed his morality of love fulfilled it.

From Alan

The Page could be improved by removing it from the web. I have never read such a poisonous and distorted picture of the Apostle Paul, not even from Muslims who love to crow “Paulianity” when blasphemously attacking the bible. You seem to have such hatred spewing out in your words that I suspect mental illness. Paul is nothing like the forged picture you have painted of him. As Luke said, God was with Paul and verified his mission. I suppose in your hatred you will tar Luke with the same brush as a “Paulian” distorting God’s word. I hope you feel better soon. This hatred of Paul must be burning you up.

Perhaps you did not read the article closely enough. It argues that Christians put more emphasis on Paul, merely a man, than Christ whom they are meant to believe was God Himself. Neither is Luke God. You are incensed because you know following Christ is something that is hard whereas following Paul requires no effort at all in comparison. So you are among the ones who emphasize Paul over Christ.

I'll add your comment to the page so that others can share your wisdom.

Further Reading

• More about the biblical Paul, more about Paul and Christianity,
• More about morality, and justice as fairness, and more, the Principle of Humanity
• A lot more on religious origins—five linked webpages
• More on the death of God and secular Christianity

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History