Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Comparisons between the Bible and the Koran

Okay, I'm being repetitive, but I said I would post a comparison between Jesus and Paul, and I will.

Steph, you said:

Of course there can be no Christianity without Christ! I don't mean to imply that Christianity could exist without Jesus, believe me.

You are right, the story about Jesus was being preached by other apostles and disciples before Paul became an apostle. It was being spread to other people by others than Paul. And it was Paul's job to stop the work of those apostles and the spreading of that "heretical religon", and that, incidentally, was what he was busy doing when he had his amazing revelation on his way to Damascus: he was on his way to arrest those who spread the teachings of Jesus.

So it was not as if Paul just invented Christianity and made up a story that no one else had heard before. Of course not! But I still maintain that Paul was crucially important when it came to making the teachings and story of Jesus legitimate in the Roman Empire, which was the military and economic superpower of its time. To "travestize" that song about making it New York (New York, New York, what a wonderful place! If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere...) - yes, I think it was crucially important for Christianity to "make it" in the Roman Empire, because that, I think, is what made it possible for Christianity to eventually become the biggest and most powerful religion of the world. Christianity was given an enormous boost when it became the state religion of the Roman Empire around 325 B.C., and about a hundred years later it was the only permitted religion in the Roman Empire. All other religions were outlawed. When Rome fell, the (Catholic) church survived, and it remained in many ways the most powerful force in Europe for at the next ten centuries.

It was Paul who made Christianity's success possible, in my opinion. And that was no mean feat, because any teachings about Jesus were sure to be highly controversial in Rome. How so?

Well, the Romans were well aware that Jesus had been called the Messiah. They also knew that the Jews were waiting for a Messiah who would literally be the King of the Jews here on the Earth. The Jews waited for a Messiah who would defeat his enemies on this Earth and recreate King David's mighty kingdom here on Earth. And who were the enemies of the Jews here on Earth, then? Who were the people that the Messiah was supposed to defeat? Well, how about the Romans? The Romans had occupied what was once the Kingdom of David, turning it into the Roman province of Palestine. If a Jewish Messiah wanted to recreate David's kingdom, he would have to turn against the occupying Roman forces and try to oust them. In other words, if the Jews thought that Jesus was the Messiah, then they also expected him to lead a revolt against the Roman forces in Palestine. When the Romans saw that Jews called Jesus the Messiah, they thought that Jesus was a potential rebel leader and a sworn enemy of Rome.

Those of you who are Christians will object that Jesus was nothing like that. You can point to various passages in the Gospels where Jesus says that his kingdom is not of this Earth, and that his mission is to help people find salvation in heaven, not build a mighty kingdom on the Earth. But the Romans wouldn't have known or understood this. Remember that when Jesus was crucified, Pilate put a sign at the top of his cross which read I.N.R.I. That stands for, approximately, Iesus Nazareth Rex Iudea (Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews). Clearly this was a way of mocking the Jews and telling them that their Messiah had been executed.

But wasn't it the Jews themselves that wanted Jesus to be killed? Well, the Gospels say so, but I don't believe it. I can see no reason for a majority of the Jews to turn against Jesus. What had he done to offend them? He was not a powerful man, and he didn't have an army. There is no way that he can have oppressed, let alone tortured or killed, a lot of Jews. Why would the Jews hate him so? More to the point, why would they like the occupying forces, the Romans, so much better than their own compatriot that they would ask the Romans to kill Jesus for them?

I don't believe those parts of the Gospels which claim that Pilate had to kill Jesus because he was scared of defying the bloodthirsty Jews. I think those parts of the Gospels have been added later as a way of appeasing the Romans and to make it possible to bring the story of Jesus to Rome. After all, how could you possibly tell the Romans that Jesus was the Son of God and it was the Romans' fault that he had been executed?

Jesus was a confrontational sort of person. He often attacked figures of authority in the Jewish society, the Pharisees, the scribes, the High Priests. He rudely cleansed the Temple of the money-changers and those who sold pigeons in there. He was provocative. And he often, repeatedly, defended those who lived at the very bottom of society: the poor, the sick, the despised, the tax collectors, the women and the children.

You usually don't get very many brownie points from those at the top of your society by sticking up for the people at the bottom of it.

The Jesus who always defended the poor and the sick made this demand of those who wanted to go to Heaven:

I think that this was, by and large, a Messiah that you just couldn't sell to the Roman Empire. A Messiah who could be suspected of wanting to attack the Roman Empire, and an impolite rebel who spoke ill of authority and defended those that most powerful people had little interest in.

So in order to be presentable to the Romans, Jesus had to be given a rather radical make-over, and Paul was up to the task of giving him one. And the most important thing that Paul did to make Jesus look, well, much more "well-groomed" and "civilized", was not to quote anything that Jesus had said at all! Okay, I'm exaggerating - a little. I once looked for passages in Paul's letters where he quoted anything that Jesus had said while he lived here on the Earth, and the only thing I could find was that Paul quoted what Jesus had said at the Last Supper about the wine being his blood and the bread being his body. Apart from that, though, Paul never quoted anything that Jesus had said! All his teachings where he defended the poor and the sick, and all the times when he defended women in general and fallen women in particular: Paul never quoted any of it. In Paul's letters, nothing is left of Jesus the rebel, the man who defends the small and the powerless and those that are scorned by the rest of society.

Instead, Paul defended authority. His main message, I think, is that people gain salvation by believing that God has sacrificed his only Son for them, and that they will be let into Heaven if they believe that Jesus has overcome death for them. But in order to gain salvation people must also behave themselves correctly while they live here on the Earth, which means obeying authority.

So even though Jesus never issued a general rule that people should obey authority, and even though he certainly never said that women should obey their husbands, Paul repeatedly said that women must submit themselves to their husbands!

Was Paul a bared-faced liar? Did he deliberately distort the message of Jesus? No, I'm certain that Paul himself believed absolutely in what he was telling people. If he hadn't believed in his own message, how could he have persevered for so many years, overcoming so many terrible difficulties, so that he could keep telling it?

No, Paul wasn't a liar in any way, but I think that the revelation that he had on his way to Damascus was so strong that it made him lose interest in the Jesus who had lived on the Earth and spoken to people around him. Paul's Jesus was the blinding light and the booming voice from the heaven and the divine majesty it had revealed to him. That was the Jesus that Paul wanted to speak about to people around him, and that was the Jesus that he wanted to bring to the Roman Empire.

Paul was also a scholar, who knew the Old Testament quite well. I think Paul was a lot more interested in reconciling his vision of the majestic Jesus of Heaven with the teachings of the important prophets in the Old Testament than with reconciling it with the teachings of the Jesus who had walked the Earth like an ordinary man like the rest of us.

Anyway, to me the differences between Jesus of the Gospels and Paul are huge. Admittedly one of the Gospels, John, is closer to the teachings of Paul than the other ones. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Gospel of John is the Gospel that I personally like the least.

Ann