By Day of Greenleaf, the Founding Yaiyr
“Paul was the first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus!”
— Thomas Jefferson
Well, Thomas Jefferson was close! Actually, as explained in Expanded Footnote Seven, the first major corrupter of the doctrines of Yahshua (‘Jesus’) was Peter. After the crucifixion Peter refused to follow the Lord’s appointed successor, Mary Magdalene, because she was a woman. Peter led the first schism off the original Nasarean Christianity, throwing out the Divine Feminine, founding what became known as Ebionite Christianity. Most scholars refer to this Ebionite Christianity by the term Jewish Christianity, though Peter and the Ebionites never used that term. Paul led the second major schism in Christianity, founding the Roman Christianity that evolved into the Roman Catholic Church and gave birth to both the Eastern Orthodox faith and Protestantism. Paul, who came on the scene twenty years after the crucifixion and never met Yahshua, infiltrated and then led a schism off of Peter’s Ebionite Christianity, which at that time was the only form of Christianity large enough in Israel to bother infiltrating. The Nasarean form was much smaller in Israel, most of its leaders already having been killed and the Magdalene having fled to France (then called Gaul).
Rather than criticize Thomas Jefferson for being a bit off in his assertion that “Paul was the first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus”, we commend Jefferson for having noticed the fact that Paul had, indeed, changed Yahshua’s doctrine. Jefferson, without any of the recently discovered scrolls or scholarly works, simply noticed that the teachings of Jesus in the mainstream New Testament were very different from the teachings of Paul. In fact, there are many more words of Paul than Jesus in the mainstream New Testament, and modern Christianity is based more on the teachings of Paul than the teachings of Yahshua (‘Jesus’). Until having access to The Holy Megillah and related texts, I, like Jefferson, believed Paul to have been the first corrupter of the teachings of Yahshua. Although I later realized that Paul was second to Peter in chronology of schisms, Paul’s schism has had the biggest effect in that his form of Christianity, which I call Paulianity, evolved into modern Christianity. Jefferson, noticing the wild divergence of the opinions of Paul from the teachings of Jesus, took a pair of scissors and cut all the words of Paul out of his Bible!
Thomas Jefferson is not the only great thinker to notice that, even when we confine our observations to the mainstream New Testament, the teachings of Paul differ radically from the teachings of Jesus. Some of the other great thinkers who noticed this and wrote about it include the following.
The Rev. V.A. Holmes-Gore, in his book Christ or Paul, wrote:
“Let the reader contrast the true Christian standard with that of Paul and he will see the terrible betrayal of all that the Master taught…. For the surest way to betray a great Teacher is to misrepresent his message…. That is what Paul and his followers did, and because the Church has followed Paul in his error it has failed lamentably to redeem the world…. The teachings given by the blessed Master Christ… were as utterly opposed to the Pauline Gospel as the light is opposed to the darkness.”
The great theologian vc, writing in The Journals, echoes the above sentiment:
“In the teachings of Christ, religion is completely present tense: Jesus is the prototype and our task is to imitate him, become a disciple. But then through Paul came a basic alteration. Paul draws attention away from imitating Christ and fixes attention on the death of Christ the Atoner. What Martin Luther, in his reformation, failed to realize is that even before Catholicism, Christianity had become degenerate at the hands of Paul. Paul made Christianity the religion of Paul, not of Christ. Paul threw the Christianity of Christ away, completely turning it upside down, making it just the opposite of the original proclamation of Christ.”
The brilliant theologian Ernest Renan, in his book Saint Paul, wrote:
“True Christianity, which will last forever, comes from the gospel words of Christ not from the epistles of Paul. The writings of Paul have been a danger and a hidden rock, the causes of the principal defects of Christian theology.”
Will Durant, in his Caesar and Christ, wrote:
“Paul created a theology of which none but the vaguest warrants can be found in the words of Christ….Through these interpretations Paul could neglect the actual life and sayings of Jesus, which he had not directly known…. Paul replaced conduct with creed as the test of virtue. It was a tragic change.”
Robert Frost, winner of the Pulitzer prize for poetry in 1924, 1931, 1937 and 1943, in his A Masque of Mercy, wrote:
“Paul, he’s in the Bible too. He is the fellow who theologized Christ almost out of Christianity. Look out for him.”
James Baldwin, in his book The Fire Next Time, declared:
“The real architect of the Christian church was not the disreputable, sunbaked Hebrew (Jesus Christ) who gave it its name but rather the mercilessly fanatical and self-righteous Paul.”
Martin Buber, the most respected Jewish philosopher of this century, wrote in Two Types of Faith:
“The Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount is completely opposed to Paul.”
The famous mystic, poet and author, Kahil Gibran, declared in Jesus the Son of Man:
“This Paul is indeed a strange man. His soul is not the soul of a free man. He speaks not of Jesus nor does he repeat His Words. He would strike with his own hammer upon the anvil in the Name of One whom he does not know.”
Above, the great Gibran, accurately reported something that I noticed when I first read the epistles of Paul as a youngster: PAUL DOES NOT QUOTE FROM THE WORDS OF JESUS!
(Even before the gospels were written, all initiated Christians were instructed in the sayings of Jesus.) When you read the epistles of Paul, the Father of mainstream Christianity, all you get is Paul’s own ideas; he never quotes the wise sayings of Jesus, neither does he report on the life of Jesus. That point is also made by the famous theologian Helmut Koester, in his The Theological Aspects of Primitive Christian Heresy:
“Paul himself stands in the twilight zone of heresy. In reading Paul, one immediately encounters a major difficulty. Whatever Jesus had preached did not become the content of the missionary proclamation of Paul…. Sayings of Jesus do not play a role in Paul ‘s understanding of the event of salvation…. Paul did not care at all what Jesus had said…. Had Paul been completely successful very little of the sayings of Jesus would have survived.”
The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, in his Not Paul But Jesus, declared:
“It rests with every professor of the religion of Jesus to settle within himself to which of the two religions, that of Jesus or that of Paul, he will adhere.”
The eminent theologian Ferdinand Christian Baur, in his Church History of the First Three Centuries, wrote:
“What kind of authority can there be for an ‘apostle’ who, unlike the other apostles, had never been prepared for the apostolic office in Jesus’ own school but had only later dared to claim the apostolic office on the basis of his own authority? The only question comes to be how the apostle Paul appears in his Epistles to be so indifferent to the historical facts of the life of Jesus…. He bears himself but little like a disciple who has received the doctrines and the principles which he preaches from the Master whose name he bears.”
The great Mahatma Gandhi, the prophet of nonviolence who won freedom from England for India, in an essay titled Discussion on Fellowship, wrote:
“I draw a great distinction between the Sermon on the Mount of Jesus and the Letters of Paul. Paul’s Letters are a graft on Christ’s teachings, Paul’s own gloss apart from Christ’s own experience.”
Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist, wrote in his essay A Psychological Approach to Dogma:
“Saul’s [Paul’s name before his conversion] fanatical resistance to Christianity…. was never entirely overcome. It is frankly disappointing to see how Paul hardly ever allows the real Jesus of Nazareth to get a word in.”
As you can see, I am quoting from the intellectual cream of humanity. A few more and I will consider my point to be made. Let us continue with George Bernard Shaw, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925; in his Androcles and the Lion, we read:
“There is not one word of Pauline Christianity in the characteristic utterances of Jesus…. There has really never been a more monstrous imposition perpetrated than the imposition of Paul’s soul upon the soul of Jesus…. It is now easy to understand how the Christianity of Jesus… was suppressed by the police and the Church, while Paulinism overran the whole western civilized world, which was at that time the Roman Empire, and was adopted by it as its official faith.”
Let us follow that Nobel prize winner with another. Albert Schweitzer, winner of the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize, has been called “one of the greatest Christians of his time.” He was a philosopher, physician, musician, clergyman, missionary, and theologian. In his The Quest for the Historical Jesus and his Mysticism of Paul he writes:
“Paul… did not desire to know Christ…. Paul shows us with what complete indifference the earthly life of Jesus was regarded…. What is the significance for our faith and for our religious life, the fact that the Gospel of Paul is different from the Gospel of Jesus? …. The attitude which Paul himself takes up towards the Gospel of Jesus is that he does not repeat it in the words of Jesus, and does not appeal to its authority…. The fateful thing is that the Greek, the Catholic, and the Protestant theologies all contain the Gospel of Paul in a form which does not continue the Gospel of Jesus, but displaces it.”
William Wrede, in his book Paul, informs us:
“The obvious contradictions in the three accounts given by Paul in regard to his conversion are enough to arouse distrust…. The moral majesty of Jesus, his purity and piety, his ministry among his people, his manner as a prophet, the whole concrete ethical-religious content of his earthly life, signifies for Paul’s Christology nothing whatever…. The name ‘disciple of Jesus’ has little applicability to Paul…. Jesus or Paul: this alternative characterizes, at least in part, the religious and theological warfare of the present day.”
Rudolf Bultman, one of the most respected theologians of this century, wrote in his Significance of the Historical Jesus for the Theology of Paul:
“It is most obvious that Paul does not appeal to the words of the Lord in support of his… views. When the essentially Pauline conceptions are considered, it is clear that Paul is not dependent on Jesus. Jesus’ teaching is – to all intents and purposes – irrelevant for Paul.”
Walter Bauer, another eminent theologian, wrote in his Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity:
“If one may be allowed to speak rather pointedly, the Apostle Paul was the only Arch-Heretic known to the apostolic age.”
My point has been made. Many great thinkers join Thomas Jefferson in declaring that PAUL REPLACED THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS WITH HIS OWN VERY DIFFERENT TEACHINGS.
Readers of The Holy Megillah know that Nasarean Christianity includes vegetarianism. It is Paul who threw the vegetarian teachings of Yahshua (‘Jesus’) out of Christianity. In his Epistle called “Romans”, Paul wrote:
“… he whose faith is weak eats only vegetables…. For meat destroys not the work of God.”
Later, after Paul had led an outright schism against the “old Apostles” (i.e. against those who had actually known, walked with, and been trained by Jesus), he went so far as to call vegetarianism a doctrine “taught by demons”; in 1st Timothy, Paul declared:
“The spirit clearly warned me that in latter times some would abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. Such teachings come through hypocritical liars… commanding people to abstain from meats, which God created to be eaten with thanksgiving…. For every animal created by God is good for eating, and none are to be refused if received with Thanksgiving.”
Paul has asserted that those whose “faith is weak eat only vegetables” and that “every animal created by God is good for eating”. He has even gone so far as to call vegetarianism a doctrine taught by “hypocritical liars” and “demons”. QUESTION: Does Paul consider Jesus to be a “hypocritical liar” or “demon”? For, both forms of Christianity that existed when Paul came on the scene twenty years after the crucifixion, the original Nasarean Christianity and Peter’s Ebionite Christianity, taught vegetarianism and made clear that the doctrine was straight from the lips of Jesus. It would seem that only an amazing egotist would set aside the teachings of Jesus and replace them with his own. And, in fact, there is evidence in Paul’s writings that he was a sort of egotist, wanting people to follow him rather than Jesus. In First Corinthians, Chapter 11, Paul declares:
“Be imitators of me…. I commend you because you remember me in everything….”
That verse not only illustrates Paul’s desire to have people follow him rather than Jesus, but leads directly to another alteration of Jesus’ doctrine: the equality of men and women. Paul wrote:
“Be imitators of me…. I commend you because you remember me in everything…. But I want you to understand that while the head of every man is Christ, the head of every woman is her husband…. And any woman who prays with her head uncovered dishonors her husband; if a woman will not cover her head with a veil, then her hair should be shaved off…. For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man…. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. That is why a woman ought to have a veil on her head, as a sign of submission to her husband that all men and angels will see…. And if anyone disagrees with me about his, they must be told to obey; for nothing else is acceptable in churches of God.”
Similarly, Paul declares in Chapter 5 of Ephesians:
“Wives be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife in the same way that Christ is the head of the church. As the church is subject to Christ, so must wives be subject to their husbands in everything.”
If you think the above words of Paul are not only egotistical — “Be imitators of me” — but also brand him as a male chauvinist, hold onto your hats (especially you women in church!); IT GETS WORSE! In Chapter 14 of First Corinthians, Paul writes:
“In all Christian churches, the women should keep silent whenever in church. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate…. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church…. If any one thinks he is a prophet or spiritual, he must acknowledge that what I am writing to you is true and from the Lord God.”
One more example of how, even confining our discussion to the mainstream Bible, it is obvious that Paul taught a very different doctrine than Jesus. That example is slavery. In chapter 6 of Ephesians, Paul instructs Christian slaves to obey their Christian slave masters as though the slave master were Jesus Christ:
“Slaves, be obedient to your masters, with fear and trembling, as to Christ.”
Likewise, in chapter 3 of Colossians, Paul orders Christian slaves in another congregation to obey their Christian slave masters:
“Slaves, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters, fearing the Lord.”
In 1st Timothy chapter 6, Paul instructs his ministerial student, Timothy, in the Pauline doctrine on slavery, and then displays his egotistical megalomania by asserting that anyone who disagrees with him knows nothing:
“Christian slaves must work hard for their owners and regard their owners as worthy of all honor…. If their owner is a Christian, that is no excuse to slow down their labor; rather, they should labor all the harder because a brother in the faith is profiting from their toil…. Timothy, teach this truth and demand that all obey. For if anyone disagrees or teaches otherwise… he is puffed up with conceit and knows nothing. Timothy, some may deny that this is the sound message of Jesus Christ… and may dispute over the meaning of Christ’s words. These arguers have warped minds, are stupid and depraved.”
I don’t believe any of my readers can imagine the above words of Paul on slavery as having come from Jesus! Jesus, the Messiah and founder of the religion Paul claimed to represent, declared:
“The Spirit of God is upon me. God has sent me to help the brokenhearted, TO PROCLAIM LIBERTY TO THE CAPTIVES!”
Yes, the above words upholding slavery, like the previous words downgrading women, are printed on the pages of the supposedly “holy” Bible, the book that Pauline Christians call “the Word of God”. The above excerpts from the Pauline bible upholding slavery were used by governmental and religious “authorities” to defend the institution of slavery for nearly 1,900 years. In fact, when Abraham Lincoln first tried to put an end to slavery in America many Christian Churches opposed him AND USED THE ABOVE WORDS OF PAUL TO DEFEND SLAVERY IN AMERICA. The Southern Baptist denomination was formed to defend the practice of slavery in America; their theological defense of slavery was based on the words of Paul. AND EVEN THE KU KLUX KLAN BASED THEIR EARLY PRO SLAVERY PROPAGANDA ON THE ABOVE WORDS OF PAUL. (The Klan was formed three years after the end of the Civil War but hoped to overturn the freedom won by blacks and return to slavery.) How many whipped black backs, stretched black necks (lynchings), cross burnings (yes, the Christian cross burned in front of a black person’s home is a symbol of the Pauline Christian Klan), and burned black churches are directly attributable to the above words of Paul?
