I’ve often wondered what Christianity would be like without the influence of Paul of Tarsus. If we take at face value his story as it is written in the Bible, what would Christianity be like today if he never entered the picture? Would there even be a Christian religion at all?
This really isn’t all that relevant, I guess, but…
“Paul of Tarsus” sounds kind of weird to me. It’s a little like “Peter of Tibia,” or “Luke of Trochanter.”
Probably. The Church was already a going concern since before Paul happened along, and if God wants the work done and Saul hasn’t put himself in the frame, there are plenty more candidates - though Paul, as an apparently lettered person and duly articled Roman citizen, was well placed to do what he did. Maybe Peter and the others would have written more!
And if Paul refers to himself. . .is it Paul of Metatarsus?
But what would it be like today without his influence? You may call the result “Chirstianity”, but would it basically be the same, or would it be drastically different?
It’s an interesting question. Most of what constitutes orthodox Christian belief today comes from Paul, not from the four gospels. It appears from Acts and from some of Paul’s letters that the Jerusalem sect under Peter and James was pretty strongly inclined to view following Jesus as a culmination of Judaism, to the point that they required circumcision and adherence to Mosaic law for gentile converts. My gut feeling is that the church would not have expanded nearly as quickly if that view had prevailed. It is possible that someone else may have stepped into the vacuum to work out the theological details of what is implied in the gospels, but who knows what form that may have taken.
I think it would have just vanished completely along with the Essenes and various other Jewish sectarian groups that were active in Judea before the Jewish-Roman wars wiped out Jerusalem and the Temple.
Without Paul, there would have been no Gentile mission, hence nothing left of Christianity at all.
As to what Christianity was like independent of Paul in 1st century Judea, groups like the Ebionites and the Nazoreans are probably not far off - Jewish Messianic sects which still followed Mosaic law and did not believe Jesus was God, but an angel of some sort. They have a lot of stuff in common with the Essenes too (lots of ritual bathing, vegetarianism, rejection of animal sacrifice).
Marcionite Christianity was a major contender too, for a while, which basically entailed a belief that Jesus was never really a man, but only a spirit. And there was all kinds of Gnostic weirdness.
Bart Ehrman has a book called Lost Christianities that describes a lot of these groups. Christianity was never really just one thing, and was doctrinally pretty scattered from early on. Whatever the original teachings and beliefs were of any ostensible “historical Jesus” has been lost. The best information we have is from Paul, who claims to have known some apostles (including James, who Paul calls “the brother of the Lord”), and Paul says they still kept Jewish law.
I saw this thread and went “bwha?!” and thenfound the earlier time-machine thread where you took my post and started this thread. Cool.
Here is my post to that earlier thread (#34):
[QUOTE=me in the other thread]
I’d be at least as interested to go back and see what we’d find with Saul of Tarsus, aka Paul.
The path of Christianity changed first when Jesus died and then when Paul spread the story. When Jesus died, his followers took that liability and turned it into a key to everlasting life - a value proposition that could appeal to people. And Paul is the one who “marketed” this value proposition and put Christianity on its path of explosive growth.
So Jesus may have been an unwashed street preacher who had the personal misfortune of dying because he disrupted local governance, but Paul was the one who took the spin that emerged from Jesus’ death and went big with it. I wonder more about what Paul was like…
[/QUOTE]
So I am not sure if Paul was the fellow who positioned Jesus’s death as a pathway to everlasting life - in fact, I assume it was one of many explanations his followers worked through as they tried to dealt with what was happening - but it certainly appears that Paul used it to lay the foundation for his brilliant work in spreading the word and building support for Christianity.
I think without Paul, the resulting faith would essentially have been a sect of Judaism. And as such, it probably would have ended up getting incorporated back into Judaism after the Diaspora. The Jewish community in Judea had a lot of divisions but once the Jews were split up into small minority communities amid non-Jews they tended to put aside their differences and band together around common traditions.
I believe the term Christianity is credited to Paul.
I see Paul quite differently then is conventionally taken. The letters of Paul in scripture to me represent the Lord’s work in Paul’s life ‘refining’ Paul as opposed to how to be a child of God. It is God taking the ‘jewish law’ out of him over time. It is a battle going on inside of Paul where Paul’s past sometimes comes out and Paul makes rules and commandments, and sometimes the Lord gets the upper hand and we have love and grace. It also shows how crazy one may appear when they decide to give up everything to follow the Lord, showing how Paul could have been seen as basically snapping mentally and running around like a fool starting churches, and even then the Lord can correct for that.
Christianity shows how far God will go to rescue his child, it is people generations later bearing the burden that was placed on Paul (well on Saul), that Paul in himself could never overcome.
I do believe the way Jesus taught and lived would be a more obvious example on how to live without all the rules, judgements and condemnations that IMHO Paul unleashed in Christianity.
It might look like Ethiopian Christianity or Indian (Thomas) Christianity or any of the eastern varieties that have been going since ancient times with little attention paid to Paul.
The problem is the Gospel writers were all Pauline Christians, so trying to use them as a guide to what Christianity was like absent Paul’s influence isn’t going to be very fruitful. So far as I know, the only source we have for what non-Pauline Christianity was like is Paul’s own brief description of the Church in Jerusalem during his visit there.
I suspect that the message, “you’re suffering now, but follow me and you can have eternal life,” would have resonated even without Paul and would have spread to Gentiles sooner or later. And the need for organization would be inevitable; if not Paul, someone else would have turned the movement into a church.
There’s no way to know how doctrine might differ. Paul did a little picking and choosing from Mosaic law, and someone else might have made different choices: “OK, gayness is fine (particularly among the chicks), but we’re still going to insist on hats.”
Is there anything specific about Paul’s writings that is glaringly in opposition to what the other apostles wrote?
We have no writings from any apostles.
The only thing we really know about them is what is in the Epistles of Paul, and Paul doesn’t say that much. He does say they still followed Jewish law, kept kosher and required circumcision for Christianity.
Meh. If not Paul, someone else. God already had the plan, Paul was just an instrument.
Meh. An “It doesn’t matter what anybody does at any time 'cause it’s gonna happen any way” opinion doesn’t really add much to the conversation, in my opinion.
It might have taken some of the same tones from John, and become Johanine Christianity. A bit more mystical, a bit more philosophical.
Would a more mystical Christianity have attracted Thomas Aquinas, or his like, to stand up for the scientific method? Or would it, instead, have prompted the leading scholars to put the revelation of scripture ahead of the revelation of nature, and squelched scientific reasoning?
No way to know; that’s the drawback of alternate history. Someone ought to write a novel…
(Poul Anderson hints at this, but only superficially, in his fantasy novels Operation Chaos and Operation Luna.)
The mystical heresies of Christianity didn’t put much emphasis on Scripture either as opposed to personal mystical experience and rituals/rules.
Perhaps, but we do have both James, which seem to be arguing the opposite of Paul’s gospel, even if it were not written by the James Paul quarrels with in Acts. Paul is all about being saved by faith and not by works. James goes the other way. While he doesn’t discount Paul’s interpretation, he points out that faith and works go together.
So, without Paul, I suspect the concept of being saved by faith and not by works would not have been taught, and while I don’t see that changing Catholicism or Orthodox beliefs, it’s a huge problem for the Protestant Reformation. While Luther would still be upset about the sale of indulgences, I can’t see him having any real doctrinal problems. Even if he still does split from the Church, Protestantism becomes largely indistinguishable from Catholicism, like the earlier splits.
This, of course, is assuming that nothing changes in the New Testament except the removal of Paul from the Christian narrative. If the Gospels are still accurate, I don’t see any of the other Epistles changing either. We just lose those things that are specific to Paul. The other two things, women being silent and submissive and the only reaffirmation of the Law against homosexuality I don’t think have as big a difference as people think, as those things were just a part of the Jewish culture, and thus would be assumed by a Jewish-derived religion. Only if Paul were replaced by some gay person or woman would I expect that to change.