The Life and Times of Saint Paul

Rabbi Saul of Tarsus had first encountered a cult called the Nazarenes in Jerusalem and became paranoid about them, seeing them as a big threat to traditional Judaism. He heard the Nazarenes were preaching in the traditional synagogues of the large Jewish community of Damascus and was given a commission from the rabbinical council to go to Damascus and verbal attack the Christians. On the road to Damascus, Rabbi Saul experienced a severe epileptic fit, in the course of which he had a ‘vision’ of the Nazarenes executed lead Yeshua, which told him to stop persecuting his followers and to become an ‘apostle’ preaching the word of Yeshua. Rabbi Saul returned to Jerusalem and under his Greek name, Paul, he joined the Nazarene community there which was under the leadership of Peter and James, who had adopted the lavish titles ‘Brothers of the Lord’. Paul was a gloomy, obsessive, outspoken, intellectual Judaic rabbi, and fitted in poorly with the cult which consisted mainly of lower middle-class, uneducated tag-alongs. The group were not sorry to see him leave to preach ‘Christianity’ in the synagogues of the Diaspora and convert the Jews there. A decade or so later, there was major conflict when Paul returned to Jerusalem and told Peter he wanted to preach to the Gentiles (non-Jews) and accept uncircumcised men into the Christian community. Paul undoubtedly had received harsh treatment for the traditional Jews of the Diaspora. He had discovered, however, a potentially large clientele - the uncircumcised, God-fearing Gentiles who were adherents to the traditions but not members of the Greek-speaking Jewish community. He wanted to offer these Gentiles, second-class citizens among the Jewish community, full membership into the Christian cult without the need for circumcision. In the end got his way, probably due to the ever-dwindling cult membership numbers, but the deep bitterness between Paul and the traditional Jewish Christians, including Peter, remained. According to Christian teachings both Peter and Paul ended up in Rome, Peter being the first ‘bishop’, and both were crucified there. Paul’s matyring was more acceptable to the cult than Peter’s. The open hostility shown by Peter towards non-Jewish members of the cult lead to his unlikely candidacy to lead the ‘church’ in Rome, even though a substantial Jewish community lived there. Paul

was thinking more long term. Paul had been denounced to the Roman authorities for ‘preaching contrary to Caesar’. The Rabbis found his conversion of the uncircumcised disturbing. Paul insisted that as a Roman citizen he should be tried in Rome, and was executed shortly after in circa 64 A.D. In the Christian New Testament, six letter are attributed to Paul that scholars believe to be authentic although they probably have undergone editing at later stages. In addition a lengthy and circumstantial account of Paul’s missions is offered by his faithful companion and fellow cult member, Luke. There are many problems in using Paul’s letters to understand his teachings. They are relatively short and are addressed to Christian cults in Asia Minor, Greece and Rome itself, and deal usually with trivial matters. Paul is assuming that his readers already know his general message, with exception of the one letter to the Romans, he has already preached there.

Even when he tries to articulate his general principles, Paul frequently seems awkward and conflicted. Indeed a leading New Testament scholar, Paula Fredrikson, after many years studying Paul’s slim writings, concluded in 1988: Paul id difficult to understand. Paul was more successful at communicating and conviction than clarity. He confused his own congregations. Paul’s teachings however remain one of the most important chapters in Jewish history (mythology?), for he alone can be given credit for the emergence of Christian cult into mainstream society. Paul was greatly admired by and profoundly influenced leading Christian cult leaders throughout the ages. Saint Augustine in the fifth century, Martin Luther in the sixteenth, and Karl Barth in the twentieth, however, o the end of his life Paul remained an observant Jew. He also did not disparage Judaism in the interest of the Gentiles. He said that the cult’s message was equally challenging to both, “...a stumbling block for Jews and folly for Gentiles.”. So what was the nature of his teachings that were so troubling for his colleagues, the Rabbis of orthodox Judaism. At it’s most existentially disturbing level, he removed the barriers of circumcision and allowed any who converted their will (and finances!) to the Christian cult to enter the new community. Similarly he allowed Jews and Gentiles to eat together, and whilst he personally continued to observe Judaic dietary laws, this coming-together of Jew and Gentile for meals effectively terminated the Jewish characteristics of the cult as much as the lifting of the circumcision barrier. By these actions, Paul was in fact creating the internationally-minded ‘faith’. Jewish cult members could not help but be deeply disturbed, and his Rabbi colleagues regarded him as a traitor to traditional Jewish Law. Paul’s automatic response to this was, whilst not advocating the total dissolution of Jewish Law, called it a psychological impediment and the ultimate ‘moral curse’. It is easy to believe that Paul expected that, among Jewish Christians, the Law would soon wither away from its power to shape religious ideology and constraint individual and group behaviour. One of the main themes in Paul’s thinking was the doctrine of justification via faith. He thought deeply about the significance of the myth concerning Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, which to him symbolised the fall of man, the innate corruption inherent in human nature. Paul believed that by ourselves we can never justify God’s love, we are rooted in sin, in rebellion against God. So god sent His son to be incarnated in human form, and in this life and death he earned such merit that mankind could vicariously through Jesus Christ achieve salvation - but only if God chooses us individually: We cannot love God until He loves us, until he justifies our existence, makes us personally just, and embraces us. Paul’s salvation theology is grounded in disillusionment with the Jews’ historical role as the ‘man of sorrows’ by whose suffering mankind is supposed to be redeemed. That had not happened, and a disillusioned Paul then to the teachings of the political antagonist of Galilee, Yeshua, who saved mankind by the expiation of his blood as ‘Jesus Christ’. Paul’s political doctrine was founded in apocalyptical sociology. The world is coming to an end soon. It makes no sense now to draft constitutions or to change governing bodies. So

stay in subjection to the current governing authorities and cultivate instead one’s personal relationship with God. Internally we are all free, whether slave or citizen, Jew or Gentile. Externally we should accept where God had chosen for us to be in society, whose days are in any case running out. This is a doctrine of extreme acceptance of the status quo, overtly conservative in nature. The rabbis turned their backs on Jerusalem when it was doomed and made a deal with the Roman power so that Torah study (Jewish Law) could endure. Similarly Paul wanted his Christian communities to keep quiet and not arouse the attention of the authorities. In both instances the life of quiet learning and prayer is validated whilst the life of political activism is discouraged. Paul’s view on sex and marriage is very different from the traditional Jewish one. Paul told his cult followers that it is best to stay celibate and not to marry. Marriage is only for those who burn with desire and cannot control themselves. Sex inside marriage is purely for the purpose of procreation. The rabbis permitted sex only in marriage too, but they accepted a man’s ‘carnal knowledge’ (the biblical term) of a woman as a natural thing. They had no admiration for celibacy. It is God’s will that Jews marry, and enjoyment of the sexual act inside marriage is commendable. In accordance with Pharisaic tradition, “a Jew who has no wife is not a man.” Where did Paul get these radical ideas that exploded the framework of traditional Judaism at the same time that he skilfully drew on much of its rhetoric? First there were the strong influences from Hellenistic culture, especially from Platoic and Stoic philosophy and also from dualistic Gnosticism. Paul believed that this generation of Diaspora Jews were searching to restructure the Jewish religion in terms of vanguard Hellenistic thinking. In Asia Minor where Paul was brought up and educated, the Greek mystery religions, such as Isis and Great Mother, were very active, and this background also reflects in his teachings. In the mystery religions a saviour-god in human form dies, is reborn, and carries those of mankind who have fastened themselves to the reborn deity by some sacramental rite to safety and immortality. Paul’s theology combined a historical human messiah in the Jewish mode with the sacramental saviour-god of a mystery religion.

The ultimate explanation for Paul’s beliefs however was psychological. He wanted activity, he wanted turmoil, he wanted to create a revolution in faith, he wanted to found a new international community of ‘true believers’. That is where Paul’s satisfaction lay, and not in leading a traditional synagogue community. Paul offered one kind of redemption to the Jews, a kind taken up and used in the Gospel of John in circa AD 100, to reinterpret and distort the life of Yeshua. Paul’s Christianity offered to the Jews a redemption through a saviour religion and an international multicultural congregation. Jews did not have to give up their Law, but there was no need and some disadvantage to maintaining it. So most circumcised Jews rejected Paul’s message just as thousands of uncircumcised hangers-on to Jewish tradition relished it. Paul’s background in the Diaspora gave him a perception of a developing religious crisis in the Roman Empire. Old Greco-Roman Pagan practices were losing their appeal. They wanted a religion in which a saviour-god gave them security in this life and eternal bliss in the next. The mystery religions such as Isis offered that, but Paul must have noticed how popular Judaism was, with its holy scriptures, its historical myths, and its puritan ethics. If Judaism would offer a dying and reborn saviour-god incarnated in human form, and if it dropped the severe requirement of circumcision, it would gain vast numbers of new members from among the Gentiles and possibly become the dominant religion of the expanding Roman world. But the rabbis would not do this and the Jewish Christians would not give up circumcision and their dietary laws. They, like the rabbis, were missing a unique opportunity that Paul had seized upon. He had the mind of a media entrepreneur who assesses the market and gives the people what they want. Only a small number of circumcised Jews bought into Paul’s Christianity. They found it personally repugnant to take baths with the uncircumcised and share food with them. To do so was to become impure oneself. The ethnic, circumcised Jews shunned Christianity for additional reasons. Until the mid-second century AD the Jews were more wealthy as a group than the Christians. Only after about AD 200 were there probably more Christians than Jews in the Roman world. Furthermore, Judaism was an officially tolerated religion, Christianity was not. Even in AD 300, when the Christians were a quarter of the population of the Roman Empire and the Jewish segment of the population had shrunk to less than five percent, a Jew might still feel that his was a more privileged religion. Why join? Indeed, all through the second and third centuries AD there were Christians conversions to Judaism, moreso than those who went the other way. The millions of ethnic Jews who drifted away from their faith conveniently disappeared normally into the mass of the Pagan populations and much more rarely into the Christian church before it became a state-privileged entity in the fourth century.