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 Paul Overset the Living Original Christianity,
Falsified the Teachings of Jesus and Laid the
Foundation for a State Religion and an
Externalized Church of Rituals
A theologian tells us that Saul of Tarsus in Asia Minor, a Jewish Pharisee, was a bitter enemy of Jesus of Nazareth and persecuted the early Christian community. Saul one day declared that he had heard a revelation of Christ within himself. He also said that he had seen Him in a vision. So Saul changed his orientation. Supposedly, Saul now wants to fight for Him, and no longer against Him. But the Jewish Pharisee Saul did not become a member of the early Christian community; rather, he started giving sermons without first preparing himself, without speaking to the apostles, and without knowledge of what the prophetic Spirit was revealing in the early community.
Soon it became evident that Saul, called Paul after his supposed conversion, mixed the teachings of Christ with his Roman conceptions and that he had a falling out with some early Christian groups which had formed here and there. Saul, now supposedly Paul, allows neither the early Christians, nor the prophetic Spirit in the early Christian communities to correct him. On the contrary, he reports his own “revelations.” And through an argument with Peter, whom Paul openly accused of hypocrisy (Gal. 2: 11–13), new disagreements were ignited concerning the consumption of meat* and early Christian meals.
The issue was also whether Jewish rules of faith applied in the early Christian communities, including the rules about food. Paul accuses Peter of not having shared the communal meal with converted heathens because of Peter’s Jewish notions and that he had also led Barnabas astray, who was Paul’s companion. Did Peter accordingly keep the Jewish food laws with reduced meat consumption? Or did he eat no meat at all, as he and the other apostles had learned from Jesus?
Paul on the other hand had not known Jesus and did not know how Jesus had taught His apostles. Paul may have been a Jew, but he was also a citizen of Rome; and he ate meat, as others did, above all wealthy Romans – without limitation. He had no awareness of the fact that some will forgo the enjoyment of meat out of love and respect for our second neighbors, the animals. It did not bother him if the meat had first been sacrificed to pagan “gods” before it was offered for sale at the market, because, according to Paul, there are no gods. Paul also favored meat for the early Christian communal meal and probably also for the Lord’s Supper, as long as no one objected. This was the only reason he would forgo meat. He wrote: Eat whatever is sold in the meat market without raising any question on the ground of conscience. (I Cor. 10:25) Again, he was not considering the suffering of the animals, but the sacrifice to pagan deities.
In the Lord’s Prayer, Christians pray: Your kingdom come, Your will be done. If the Kingdom of God is to come to the people, then the people have to prepare for it. In the Kingdom of God there is no consumption of meat.
But the Church makes it easy for itself and for its believers, by claiming: The coming new world and thus peace with nature are according to the Christian faith the work of God. Human beings cannot produce the conditions of the Kingdom of God. (Evangelische Kirche Deutschlands, in: Zur Verantwortung des Menschen für das Tier als Mitgeschöpf (1991) p. 9 [Lutheran Church of Germany, in: About Man’s Responsibility for the Animal as a Fellow Creature]).
Back to Paul:
It became increasingly clear that Paul was falsifying the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, because the differences between Paul on the one side and the apostles and Jesus of Nazareth on the other became more and more pronounced. The apostles had been trained and taught by Jesus directly, while Saul, now supposedly Paul, did not know Jesus. Paul hardly had an inner relationship to true original Christianity. Instead of letting others tell him about Jesus and orienting himself to Him as an example as far as possible, Paul simply declared that his lack of instruction from Jesus simply did not matter. He believed that he was united with Christ internally (Gal. 2:20) and writes in a self-assured manner about the situation of the early Christians of his day: Even though we once regarded Christ from a human point of view (meaning the other apostles), we regard him thus no longer. (II Cor. 5:16) Saul, now self-styled Paul, re-programmed the teachings of Jesus through his intellectual Roman background of rituals. For example, Paul thought that the blood that ran during Jesus’ crucifixion received once and for all the redemptive power in God (Rom. 3:25, 6:10), so that animal sacrifices were no longer necessary. And so, Jesus was the “sacrificial lamb,” so to speak. In his letter to the Romans, Paul writes: But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. (Rom. 5:8) The words while we were yet sinners show that Christ’s sacrifice of redemption meant atonement once and for all, to Paul.
This is what the theologian tells me.
Jesus’ teachings on the other hand were entirely different. He wanted no “expiatory sacrifices,” but wished that all people keep the commandments of God and the Sermon on the Mount of Jesus, in order to thus be there for their neighbor. Among other things, Paul said that simply the belief in Jesus’ death as the energy of salvation “without merit” raised people to true life. That is nice to hear, of course, for people who let others do their thinking for them, who are satisfied with words, but do not follow through with deeds.
A large part of the teachings of Paul is a motley collection of his concepts that have nothing to do with Jesus, the Christ. Jesus taught about keeping the commandments of God and the Sermon on the Mount, that people should open up the Kingdom of God within themselves. Whoever does so, by following the teachings of Jesus, the Christ, will find God in the very basis of his soul, without priests, that is, spiritual superiors; he has no need of intermediaries.
For whatever reasons, Paul felt compelled to assume responsibility in the early communities. He brought his intellectual notions into the community of fishermen, carpenters and apostles. The simple believers, who used Jesus, the Christ, for orientation, apparently had no practice in disputing and could not stand up to the self-important scribe “Paul.” Trained in the rhetorical arts, Paul drew on his Jewish theological knowledge, thus imperceptibly altering the Christian teachings, the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. He undermined them.
Because Paul placed himself above the early Christian communities and imported his ideas into them, ideas that were full of Roman rituals, he laid the foundation for the state and people’s religion of the Roman Empire, in which the central teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, the Ten Commandments, and the Sermon on the Mount, no longer played a role.
And so, Paul overset the living, original Christianity, in which the prophetic Spirit was active. He laid the foundation for a church of rituals with priests and bishops, in which the old rituals came to life again, the rites, ceremonies, robes, pulpits and altars, just what people were used to in their old religions. The pagan cult continued to build on an external religion in which the individual no longer strove to purify his or her own temple, the soul and the body, but would take part in rituals and listen to those who had themselves celebrated and honored as shepherds of a ritualistic church.
The church of rituals, the externalized church, triumphed – the church of inwardness, of inner reflection, faltered.
On the foundations of the church of rituals, Paul built a concept of the state: in an intellectually adept speech, he made the “Christians” believe that they were to obey worldly authorities, since these authorities were set up and appointed by God, and who, as “servants of God,” execute the just “wrath” of God with the sword. (Rom.13:4)
In the nearly 2000 years that followed, this teaching of Saul, “Paul,” had and still has a devastating effect. But it has nothing to do with Jesus of Nazareth and the living Original Christianity.
Jesus and the apostles taught: Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s (Mt. 22:21), but also: We must obey God rather than men. (Acts 5:29)
* Editor’s note: The use of the word “meat” also refers to fish and fowl.
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