There’s Gristle in my Epistle: S/Paul of Tarsus Committed Grand Theft Religion

 

Perhaps you were lucky enough to grow up without a religious background. Perhaps your guardians were either hardened, borscht-swilling atheist Marxists or the type of enlightened freethinkers one might find at a local Universalist Unitarian meeting – you know, the type who let their children name themselves and pick their own spiritual path. Perhaps you did grow up with a hand-me-down religion, but perhaps it was Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, or any other religion available in this great big world.

Whatever the reason, if one comes unindoctrinated to the story of Jesus of Nazareth, AKA Jesus Christ, AKA Lil Chri$ty (shouts to CHRI$T DILLINGER), portions of it may seem rather odd. You may note contradictions, obtuse and damn-near-impenetrable story problems or riddles, and quite a bit more exorcism and casting out of demons than you may have expected.

more like "front kick me Jesus," right Bobby Bare?

The story of Jesus is probably the murkiest, most muddled mess of a “world religion” to bleed out of the MENA region. In part, this is because the transition from one loose-knit, tiny group of apocalyptic Jewish oddballs to a rigidly codified (and aggressively anti-Semitic) religion was incredibly rapid, taking place in less than three centuries. Yes, Islam developed much more quickly, but Islam was a single-source religion. The Quran was recited by a single individual, and written in its complete form by one of Mohammed’s original scribes within 20 years of the religious leader’s death. Christianity was a religion that could have been single-source: like Islam, Christianity was based (supposedly) on the words of a single person. However also ike Islam, Christianity’s single source of revelation was illiterate: neither Jesus nor Mohammed could read or write. Unlike Islam, the closest Christianity came to an accurate compilation of Jesus’ teachings was the hypothetical collection of Jesus’ sayings referred to as the Q source. The Gospel of Mark (which is the earliest Gospel put to paper) was written somewhere around the time of Jerusalem’s destruction, which would place it within decades of Jesus’ execution. The Q source is a theoretical bridge that explains the similarities between Mark’s and Matthew’s Gospels (but not the scattershot, incoherent mess of the Christian Bible as a whole).

You may have heard of the so-called “Gnostic Gospels,” a collection of soon-to-be-heretical Christian works that reflected the wide diversity of the religion at the time. “Christianity” did not exist; what existed instead was a broad panoply of mystical and philosophical interpretations of the life and death of one of many would-be messiahs: Jesus of Nazareth. The Gnostic Christians viewed Jesus’ life and death through the lens of paganism and - more importantly - Greek philosophy. This is absolutely an effect of Christianity’s contact with Rome and its greater imperial holdings. In Rome, Greek philosophy, like Greek theater, was both popular and deeply influential (o the dismay of assholes like Cato.) There was no “Gnostic Christianity” at the time, just as in the early days there was no “Christianity” at all – only an eccentric movement within Judaism that declared Jesus of Nazareth to be the messiah, despite the fact that he neither led Israel to global dominion nor ushered in a golden age of plenty (Isaiah 9:7) before his ignominious execution. The Gnostic Gospels are essentially the Christian scripture that wound up on the cutting room floor rather than integrated into one or more of what would come to be known as the more-or-less official Christian Bible.

good times at the Laughing J Ranch

The Greek philosophy of the Gnostics is as tragic as the mishmash of propaganda, biography, outright lies, and inconsistencies that became the standard Christian Bible. Tragic because in no way, shape, or form did Jesus think that his message (such as it was) would be contaminated by what he doubtlessly would have considered a corrupt foreign philosophy. Jesus did not intend his teachings to apply to – or even be heard by – gentiles (by “gentiles,” Mormons, I mean non-Jews -sorry, but your use of the term is both dumb and fucking offensive). Jesus’ low-key declarations that he was the messiah came with the unspoken shorthand that he was the Jewish messiah, the scion of David (doubtful) who would lead the nation of Israel to glory. Here, of course, I don’t mean the modern country of Israel, but “nation” in an archaic sense. All of Jesus’ disciples agreed with this point of view. In fact, the most instructive example of this is Jesus’ apostle and brother James the Just (yes, Jesus’ actual brother-from-the-same-mother). James led the movement after Jesus met the fate of all would-be revolutionaries who defied Rome. By all accounts, he was well-loved by Jesus-believers and Jews alike, and James was based in Jerusalem, not Rome. James, like all of the apostles at the time, thought that the Jesus movement was for Jews and Jews alone.

The one person who, it seems, did not get along with James was the so-called “Apostle Paul” (hereafter referred to as Paul, since he never met Jesus and appeared on the scene fairly late in the game for Apostolic adoration). Paul was, to put it bluntly, a grifter, a dilletante, a liar, and a malignant narcissist. Paul got his start as Saul, supposedly a Pharisee (one of Second Temple Judaism’s priestly classes), and made his reputation ruthlessly persecuting early followers of Jesus (if you trust the word of an anti-Semite, which he absolutely was). At one point, Saul had a vision. It was not the blinding vision of a resurrected Jesus, as he claimed: it was a vision of the wide-open potential for a somewhat Jesus-based faith to make major inroads among the Greek-speaking populace of the Roman world. Saul, after his “vision” of Jesus, became Paul and set about spreading the Good News, i.e., wriggling his way into VIP status in a potentially up-and-coming movement.

not gonna lie, I'd buy this comic on first sight

The problem is that Paul seemed to have no interest in Jesus whatsoever. He never met Jesus (despite his “vision”), but claimed equal standing with the men who had traveled, broken bread, and held conversations with Jesus of Nazareth – the actual failed messiah, not some goofy and convenient “vision.” Paul had no patience for learning from the apostles. He was not based in Jerusalem: he was a Roman citizen, something that not all Romans could claim at the time. Paul traveled the Mediterranean, spreading his version of Christianity to various gentile communities. There, he set up churches and chose church leaders. Among the many heresies that Paul taught was that Christians did not have to convert to Judaism to be Christian: i.e. (and most importantly to many penis-having gentiles) they did not have to be circumcised. To believers who were as deeply steeped in Judaism as Jesus was, this was a monstrous blasphemy, committed by an unlikable dissembling upstart. Worse than that, an upstart engaged in aggressive evangelism and spreading spun-from-straw theology. Quite rightly, the real apostles thought that Paul represented a legitimate threat to the integrity of their new faith.

As a young, bookish, and enthusiastic Catholic, I was curious who Paul was. His fingerprints were all over the Christian Gospel, and selections from his letters were frequently the subject of homilies by my local priest, the more-or-less affable Rudolph Daz (AKA Father Daz). Paul’s epistles were a bit of a mystery to me at the time. Even as an adolescent, I found Paul’s harangues needlessly hostile, even shrill. Little did I know it, but I was on to something. Paul was pissed off, and the events that explain his umbrage are a perfect illustration of what an asshole he was. They also provide an illuminating look at the theft of a religious movement by a charlatan, virtually in real time.

Paul was, as I previously mentioned, a Roman citizen. The apostles and earliest converts to the Jesus movement were not, and more importantly for the religion they were based in Jerusalem, where his follows expected him to return. James, Peter, and the rest of the gang believed Jesus’ return to be imminent. After all, hadn’t the eccentric healer and exorcist told them that “Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom”? (Matthew 16:28) Paul, on the other hand, traveled hither and yon. Paul had some strange ideas, and the Jesus whose religion he spread bore little resemblance to the one the apostles had personally known.

To boil a complicated conflict down to its most salient points, I think it would be fair to call Paul the first “Christian.” Before him, those who joined the Jesus sect considered themselves Jews, whatever the larger Jewish community might think, and observed halakha: “the way,” or Jewish law. Paul was also a Jew, though he renounced his Judaism in the same sentence that he used it to batter others with his authority (Philippians 3:1-7). He even claimed to be a former Pharisee (“a Pharisee born of Pharisees,” Acts 23:6), but I’d take that with a grain of salt. Most importantly for our purposes, Paul taught Jews and gentiles alike that Jesus’ coming had more or less rendered halakha obsolete (refer again to Philippians 3:7). When the formal leadership of the movement in Jerusalem heard of this, they were outraged. They sent emissaries to many of the congregations that Paul had started in order to “clarify” his heretical teachings and let gentile converts know that to become a follower of Jesus, one first had to become a Jew.

this fuckin guy and his scrolls

Here’s the bit they don’t teach in Sunday school. Start with a question: why did Paul write his epistles? Why so many letters, and to such wide-flung congregations? The answer is that Paul was engaged in an Iron Age version of an internet forum flame war. His epistles were a re; to the re; the apostles had left on his teachings to his various congregations. He was correcting the people correcting him, despite the fact that they had actually known the real Jesus of Nazareth, a man Paul had never met.

Let’s leave aside the question of whether one can claim to be the follower of an undead would-be messiah who fulfilled none of the requirements set forth by the prophets of Judaism and still claim to be Jewish (leave it aside for the purposes of this post, at any rate, though my personal opinion is “fuck no”). Jesus himself likely would have considered Paul’s reconfiguration of his theology to be a violation of first principles, blasphemous, and an abomination. Remember, Jesus was the guy who started a small riot over the inclusion of gentiles in the ritual cleansing of currency, even though they were barred from the Temple proper and had their own “court of gentiles” (which is where Jesus handed out ass-kickings)*.

The Gospels of Jesus, like much of written and oral religious teachings the world over, is a complicated mishmash of contradictory and difficult-to-parse messages. It also, like many of the world’s religions, requires a hell of a lot of bad, irrational sophistry to sand away the bumps and make the text seem like a cohesive whole. Even so, the exegetical contortions that Christian apologists go through to parse the Gospel of Matthew in particular rank among my favorites. Here’s Matthew’s Jesus on the subject of preaching to gentiles (Matthew 10:5-6):

5 These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. 6 Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel.”

Those who are curious and want to read more about the adventures of Paul, the world’s first shitty Christian hypocrite, should read Reza Aslan’s Zealot, which I have used a source for much of the background information here. It’s a fantastic resource, and those interested in religion(s) should definitely pick it up. Anyone in a huff about my characterization of Paul (or anything else here), I invite you to leave a comment, message me, or (better yet) read your Bible!

*: Christian revisionism of this event is so grotesque and obscene that one source I consulted literally referred to the gentile moneychangers in the Court of Gentiles as “shysters.”