Who really founded Christianity? Was it Jesus, as most
Christians believe? Did it directly evolve from the Essene with Jesus at the
central point? Or was it Paul who established this new faith? Probably it was
an amalgamation of all the three but the role of Jesus was insignificant. He
perhaps wanted to reform the hypocritical Jews and make people live as per the
tenets of the Torah. It was St. Paul who gave a divine meaning to the passion
and death of Christ which had not been thought about by anyone else. He invented the idea that Christ died for the
sins of the world. It is obvious that most of the Christian sacraments and
rituals were not introduced by Jesus. They are found in the writings of St.
Paul who could have borrowed them from the mystery religions like Mithraism and
monastic sects like Essene.
Pauline Christianity is the most prominent one that shaped
the early Christian communities. Many of the best references to support the
theology which Christians hold on to and support are gleaned from the epistles
of St. Paul. Hyam Maccoby (British Jewish scholar and dramatist who specialized
in the study of the Jewish and Christian religious traditions) believes St.
Paul formed a new religion, taking ideas such as baptism, the Eucharist,
Christology, the Holy Spirit, and eschatology and melded them with Jewish
sacred history, Gnosticism, the teachings of Quran community and the pagan
mystery religions like Mithraism. The teachings of Jesus had common elements
with the Jewish Pharisaical teaching and that of the Essene. Jesus was born a
Jew; he lived and died one. Jesus did not wish to abrogate Judaism, but was
only in conflict with certain practices of the Jewish elite. He wouldn’t then
accept his own divinity. The Synoptic gospels prove this point, but not John's as it was done much later after the establishment of the theology
propounded by Paul. Even the Synoptic gospels were written 30-40 years after
Christ’s death and there was plenty of time for the Pauline theological ideas to
creep into them and shape them.
Paul was a free man from the Greco-oriental world of Asia
Minor whose Roman name was Paul. In Asia Minor there were many mystery
religions, and they were centered upon young gods who died young and
resurrected. Sacraments of bread and wine prevailed too. And those were considered to be bonds between
the gods and the faithful. Through them people thought gods bestowed on them
divine life. He had all these in mind
when he went to the land of Israel.
Paul was originally a Pharisee who persecuted the
Christians. He was conscious of the
inefficiency of his own religion and was probably looking for a better one.
Paul would have compared the doctrine of the pagan mystery religions which proclaimed about gods who had passed away
in the bloom of life and risen into a new life with the one of whom the
Christians talked about who died young
on the cross. It was a part of the Jewish faith that the dead would be awakened
again. A prophet had spoken of the
revival of the Jewish men on the third day. Like the pagan sacraments,
nourishment with the bread and wine and the baptism of initiation could be
found among the new Christian communities too. Baptism with water had been a
sacrament of Judaism. The thought of the prophecy about the coming of a mighty
ruler flashed across his mind. Then he could feel not only the hopes of the
Jews, but also the yearnings of what had been promised in those mysterious
realms. But before the Messiah would return, faith in him might grant
everything that the mystery cults promised to offer to the initiated through
the sacraments.
Paul has a vision
Soon he joined the congregation of the followers of Jesus.
He read whatever he could get on the Nazarene. He was awe-inspired at the life
of this ideal man who loved the poor and preached eternal life to them. He
tried to find a new meaning for his crucifixion and passion. Why did he have to
die like that? What did he do to deserve it? Was he not the best human ever?
Still he was scourged, beaten up and made to carry a big cross on which he was
crucified. He had a new awakening. One
day He saw Jesus coming to him with a big cross in an apparition. The sight of
the Messiah carrying a heavy cross upon his bleeding shoulders was enough to
deduct that Jesus was carrying the sins of the world. He could find out a
meaning for the suffering Jesus underwent. He wanted to repent for all his sins
and he started preaching his new awakening and the new revelation to whomever
he could find.
Paul’s faith became the center of his life. The vision he had consumed his whole being.
What had happened in Paul was a revolution, a transformation rather than a mere
conversion. He had to forget many things: his past life, its wrong deeds and
its beliefs. The manifestation made him a new apostle, a new revolutionary. His
old Jewish Theo-centered-faith got converted into a new Christ-centered one.
The vision had disclosed to him the celestial meaning for life. Jesus became
the promised Messiah and the Son of God whose death and resurrection were his
main concerns.
The romantic certainty with which Paul spoke was derived
from the psychic experience. It had the power of a revolution. He seemed to get
the truth finished and completed. Jesus seemed to speak to him and he had only
to listen. Any person who has such an experience, according to psychologists,
gets the feeling that grace has descended on him.
Paul organizes a new
religion
Paul was a man of letters and he could command a literary
skill. He was well-versed in the common
religious tongue of the Greek. He also had artistic and poetic talents. All
these are reflected in Paul’s writings.
Later the Church canonized his writings and they are included in the
Bible. The letters of St. Paul propound the Christian faith.
These writing are different from the Gospel narrations. He
speaks not about the doctrine of Jesus but about him. The gospel teachings and the new faith they
enshrine take a sidetrack; theological discourses of the sacraments and the rituals
the believers have to perform take prominence. His incarnation, death and
resurrection displace the good deeds and the teachings of Jesus. According to
scholars on St. Paul’s writings, Jesus had remained a Jew always; but Paul the
Jew became Paul the Christian. Jesus, the founder of the sect had been a
prophet and dreamer and Paul organized and built up the foundations of a new
religion. He introduced a new ethical code. And to spread a new religion from
the faintest outlines, he borrowed a lot that was pagan.
As mentioned, it was St. Paul who gave a meaning to the
death of Christ and to Christianity. Many think he was the real founder of
Christianity. He was the one who developed the idea of Christ as both divine
and human. The relationship and analogies of Paul’s religion with those of the
mystery cults are so evident that sometimes historians think Paul is the
founder of a new mystery cult.
He thought of Christ as a personal redeemer, savior or Lord
through whom mankind will attain salvation. These terms were all known to the
mystery cults like Zoroastrianism that they were easily assimilated by the new
converts. Further, to attract the intellectuals of Greece, he borrows the idea
of ‘logos’ from Philo’s philosophy. He had taught that God, the All father, had
contact with the earth only through intermediary beings known as Logos, ‘the
word’, ‘the son of god’, and ‘the Holy Spirit’. See how Christ became the Son
of God and the prominence ‘word’ and Holy Spirit got accorded to in the
gospels.
Paul adopts pagan rituals and holy days
Many of the sacramental rituals of the pagans were simply
adopted as such. In many of the mystery religions there had been means for
entering into communion with God. The raw blood of the bull was eaten to have
divine life of the deity concerned. The priest’s administration ‘to cut up and
minister the cake and distribute the liquid to the devotees’ recorded in the
fragmentary inscriptions from Tomi on the Black sea scroll indicate the same
sacramental element (like the present day bread and wine sharing) in the Samo-Theracian
cult. St Paul established the doctrine of the Holy Eucharist form such mystery
religions. The sacrament of baptism was also derived from the Pagan religious
rituals. In the worship of the Pagan mother-Goddess, Cybele and her cohort
Attis, initiation into a blessed immortality was secured by anointing the body
of the novice with a mixture of mud and bran.
To spread his new religion St Paul as mentioned, adopted
many of the sacramental elements of the pagan religions. He adopted the
Mithraic Sunday instead of Jewish Sabbath. The Mithraic holidays such as
Christmas, Easter and epiphany were simply adopted as such. The sacramental
ritual of the Mithraic religion was preferred to the Jewish temple sacrifice.
Like the mythological gods, Christ, the Son of God came to be conceived of a
virgin. Pictures of Jesus and Mary which had a remarkable resemblance of the
older picture of Osiris and Horus were set up in the new Churches. Almost all the Christian ceremonies are, in
some way or other connected with the ceremonies of the mystery religions. Many
authors have brought them to light. Gerald L. Berry, ‘Author of Religions of
the World’, draws a parallel between the past mystery cults and Christianity
and shows clearly how the latter evolved from the former.
There are scholars who believe that the Gospels are opposed
to the material found in the letters of Paul. They point out to many supposed
contradictions between that which Jesus taught and what Paul wrote. These
according to them prove that the message of Jesus, a true Jewish Pharisee, was
not the same as that of Paul’s. Other scholars believe that that Jesus and Paul
are not in full contradiction with one another, and that most of what Paul
claims are already in the Gospels though in a different way. One of the reasons
for this stand could be that most of the New Testament books were written after
the theology of St. Paul was well established and known to all early
Christians. Because there are no known
writings from Jesus or any direct apostle, or anyone that actually knew Him in
the flesh. Most of what he taught is lost forever.
Why Paul does not mention anything that Jesus is said to
have done in the Bible?
In all the Epistles of Paul, there is not one word about
Christ's virgin birth. Does it mean that the story of the virgin birth had not
yet been invented when Paul wrote? A
large portion of the Gospels is devoted to accounts of the miracles Christ is
said to have wrought. But Paul has not given the slightest hint that Christ
ever performed any miracle. Is it conceivable that Paul was not acquainted with
the miracles of Christ? Didn’t he know that Christ had cleansed the leprous,
cast out devils, made the blind see, deaf hear, dumb speak, raised the dead and
walked over the lake waters? Why Paul
didn’t write a single line on the wonders Jesus did? Could it not be possible
that the accounts of the miracles wrought by Jesus had not yet been invented or
recorded anywhere when Paul's Epistles were written? (Obviously, the gospels
were a later product.)
Paul was not only silent on the virgin birth and the
miracles of Jesus; he did not have the slightest knowledge of the teachings of
Jesus like the Sermon on the Mount. Paul had not heard of Lord’s Prayer now
recited by every Christian in the world. Christ taught in parables; Paul was
not acquainted with them either. Paul, the man who perhaps established
Christianity is almost ignorant of the teachings of Christ. Why does he not
quote a single line of what Jesus Christ said in all of his thirteen
Epistles?
Is it not a wonder
that the teachings of Christ had not been known to Paul? If he did, he would
have made use of them in his writings. Why did
a Christian missionary would go to foreign lands and work for many years to convert people for Christ, and never once mention what Christ
had said to the masses, the Lord's Prayer
or at least of one of the parables and
be silent on the master’s precepts? The Churches have been teaching throughout
the centuries these teachings of Christ-the virgin birth, the miracles, the
parables, and the precepts of Jesus not mentioned by St. Paul. The answer could be that the virgin-birth,
miracles, preaching of Christ, parables, Sermon on the Mount, Lord’s Prayer and
all were not known to the world in Paul's day- or they were not yet invented!
The Christ Paul knew was the Christ he saw in a vision while
on his way to Damascus and not a living, human being, who preached and worked
among men. The Christ Paul knew and the Jesus of the Gospels is two different
beings. Paul does not speak of a Christ, followed by the multitude or one who
performed miracles and taught substantial things. He was more concerned with
why he had to die and what rituals the Christian followers Had to practice.
