It seems that Christianity, as seen today couldn’t possible be farther from the teachings of Jesus (yeah, I know, fantasy, blah blah). Although it seems to me that some major changes occurred in the Middle Ages when the Catholic Church became a political and economic powerhouse, I am getting a feeling that long before that, Paul had already hijacked the Church and taken that mass of still confused early Christians and did the bait and switch on them for his own set of beliefs.
His letters are packed with teachings that don’t really match Jesus’ teachings. He was a lot heavier on the morality thoushallnots and much lighter on the love and forgiveness side of it.
So, was Paul a faithful follower of Jesus and spreader of his teachings or did he twist the whole thing and used Christianity to spread his own set of beliefs?.
Good point and starter for the even more radical theory of “he just made the whole thing up”. Still, let’s play along with the story as it stands. Jesus came first and said what he said. Then came Paul and said what he said.
It would probably have died out as just another Jewish cult that was not accepted by mainstream Judaism without Paul. But I’ve also got to say that his authoritarian tone is off-putting. That new emphasis has always struck me as unnecessarily damaging in general. Reading Paul is a lot like reading legal briefs. Lawyers should not be making rules for religions.
I think the main difference is that Jesus really expected the world to end soon. By the time Paul got into it, that belief was starting to fade, and the focus shifted to this world somewhat, with a view to individual salvation in the next.
Most likely, Jesus’ version of Christianity little-resembles what’s in the New Testament, even ignoring all of the stuff written by Paul. Most likely, Jesus didn’t even originate most of the teachings, he inherited a group of followers from John the Baptist. Though some of those followers may have gone off with others of John’s pupils, like Dositheos.
If you look at all the other branches of Christianity (i.e. Gnosticism), you find them to be mystery religions, where the purpose isn’t the teaching so much as the secret rituals to be performed to placate the deities and to rise to the next level of learning within the church. Paul, starting his own church, without having ever met Jesus, and only having picked up the vaguest information about it, possibly years after Jesus’ death, wouldn’t know about all of these secret rituals.
When people started popping up over the next century saying that they had secret knowledge (gnosis) descended from John, Jesus, or one of Jesus’ disciples, the Gentile church smashed these down as heretical, yet quite likely there was more of what Jesus had taught in those teachings than in what was in the Gentile/Paulian church. Thanks to the destruction of Jerusalem and, probably, the rather small size of Jesus’ church in Jerusalem to begin with, this ended up not being all that difficult a task. Most of the followers of the religion came from Paul’s church and knew of Jesus only from his teachings.
Not only that, but Paul was Roman. It was the Roman government who assembled and codefied what became the religion of Christianity. Jesus’ teachings were repackaged with the latest trends in the pagan cultures (I’m not here to argue paganism is good or bad - it’s neither just another just another belief system that can help personal development or become destructive depending on the user) and sold as opiate to the masses.
As Sage Rat said, the Roman church (under Constantine’s control - who established a lot of rhetoric and dogma that had never existed prior to this) hunted down and killed the “Gnostic” sects. These included the Ebionites Nazerienes, Essenes, and others though those were the big 3 around at the time. These were generally Nomadic sects, living in small (co-ed) monastry like communities who practiced peace, spiritual mysticism, and sought to gain closer relationship with God. Pretty laid back non-offensive communities. Yet for some reason, the Romans felt they had to “stop the infidels!” and slaughtered entire communities, razing their villages to the ground and killing or enslaving the inhabitants.
So did Paul singlehandedly hijack Christianity? Positively not, but It would seem his writing aided the Roman government to usurp Jesus’ teachings for personal and political gain.
Well, sort of. He was a Jew from a family rich and/or privileged enough to have Roman citizenship. Perhaps his native language was Greek rather than Aramaic, but at any rate not Latin.
Regardless, the relationship between the Israel theocratic ruling class and the Roman Government was an incestuous one - religion and politics mixing is never good. History has proven time and time again that relationships such as the one between Israel and Rome are often corrupt in their dealings. Rome would have been smart enough to know they needed to send “one of their own” to convince the Jewish nation that they had found the “one true religion.”
So much of what Paul writes doesn’t jive with Jesus’ speakings (especially some of the non-canonical stuff) and the stuff that does appear to match often contradicts Paul himself (i.e. No Greek nor Jew, no Male nor Female in Christ, but if you’re a woman sit down and shut up in church).
Biblical corruption gathers more evidence as time passes (for those willing to accept facts over emotional anchors in our psyche). Hell, Rome wouldn’t even let people read Bibles for hundreds of years (granted most people probably couldn’t read anyway). They kept the reproduction process compartmentalized, with monks copying random pages, sections, etc - not ever seeing the whole thing.
Moses parted the REED Sea, not the Red Sea (this fact is accepted by serious Bibilical scholars). Books were removed from the Bible because women wrote them or it didn’t match another work already accepted (though may have been corroborated elsewhere). The Non-Canonical gospels are interesting reads, as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls (which really call into question the authenticity of the origin of Christian dogma and teachings as it is commonly taught today).
I would argue that perhaps if God works conciously, this fact is being revealed for those with open eyes, hearts, and minds. Or perhaps it was only a matter of time til the truth came out.
I’ve encountered the theory, before, that the early Christian Church had a body of secret teachings known only to the higher clergy – but I encountered it in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, acknowledged inspiration for The Da Vinci Code (in fact, the authors unsuccessfully sued Dan Brown for copyright infringement), and almost universally considered pseudohistorical.
I guess I do mean to be nitpicky. It is a widely accepted interpretation that it is Reed Sea, not Red Sea. An interpretation is not a fact, nor is it accepted that Moses actually existed as “fact”, much less was parted the Sea, either Red or Reed. Others interpret all this differently. The only people that I know who insist that parting of the Sea was a fact also consider it fact that it was the Red Sea because that is the way it is in the official Bible, that is, the King James Version. Facts and interpretation are different things entirely. Not that it is on point with what you are saying, but it has been a day where people have triggered a couple of my pet peeves. The other being extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
I think the point here is more that Paul’s writings may be a better representation of Jesus’ actual ministry because they’re earlier. Estimates vary, but taking the commonly-accepted scholarly view that Gospels date from 70-100 AD, Paul’s letters are at least 15 and maybe 50 years earlier. Historians usually prefer earlier sources*. Paul’s epistles may be a better source than the anonymous Gospels.
*“Usually” being subject to dozens of other credibility factors
Regarding the OP, it’s all-but-impossible at this distance to know whether Paul was mainstream or fringe. Some passages in his letters hint at the latter, the synthesis reflected in Acts suggests for former. AFAICT, early Christianity was a panoply of voices. Who (if any) had the “real goods,” who knows?
The claim of Roman citizenship for Paul appears only in Acts, which contains several non-historical claims, and probably contains unreliable statements about Paul. It is important that Paul never mentions in his own Roman citizenship in any of his own letters. It is quite possible that Paul was not in fact a Roman citizen.
I have fundamentalist friends who insist that you need not bother with earlier texts or later texts because the King James Version is the official Bible. :rolleyes: I kid you not. I do not personally subscribe to this, although I am very fond of the KJV.
I haven’t read the Da Vinci code, nor been exposed to anything that takes place or is “revealed” in it. My information comes from the Wikipedia summaries of all of the earliest people and earliest documents of Christianity that are known.
Jerusalem was destroyed around 70 CE which destroyed a lot of information. There’s also no knowing what all writings were destroyed by the early church. What writings do remain from the Gnostic churches are copies from the 3rd and 4th centuries, so there’s no way to know precisely when the originals were written except for textual clues. The only other source of knowledge is quotes from early works targeting the heretics, and the one remaining Gnostic religion, Mandaenism.
But it can be said for certain is that no sources dispute that Dositheos existed, was a contemporary of Jesus, was a student of John the Baptist, and taught Gnosticism. Dositheos and the Dositheans are talked about by Josephus and Epiphanes, around 100 CE. Hegessipus and Ireneus refer to them a few decades later, again, as contemporaries of Jesus. Sethianism is widely believed to date to earlier than Christianity. Valentinianism was founded by a guy who lived between 100 and 160 CE–probably writing mostly between 120 and 140 CE–but several of the Gnostic documents found at Nag Hammadi seem to portray a much simpler unrefined version of Gnosticism compared to what Valentinus described. These same writings show no information that places them after the 1st century. Cerinthus was written about by Josephus in 94 CE. The Simonians founder, Simon, was also referred to by Josephus, and later authors also stated that he was a contemporary of Jesus.
Nearly all Gnostic documents are dated to the 2nd century because “the 2nd century is when Gnosticism began.” Yet, none of anything I said in the last paragraph is controversial. That Gnosticism existed before Josephus is about as certain a thing as can be, so to say that it’s a 2nd century invention is just
Outside of Sethianism–which predates Christianity–every other branch of Gnosticism is related to John the Baptist, one of his students, or one of those student’s students. Why isn’t Gnosticism it’s own religion if it’s not a splinter group? Why shouldn’t I think that John the Baptist was a Gnostic when I’ve got at least two Gnostic sects reported in the 1st and 2nd centuries as saying he’s their teacher, and a contemporary 3rd sect saying the same thing?
Knowing all this, when I see a bunch of documents that look like they were probably written in the 1st century by early Christians, and in them have Jesus spouting stuff that looks Gnostic, I don’t see a lot of reason to doubt that Jesus was a Gnostic, preaching what he learned from John.
The Hebrew phrase is “yam suf.” Yam suf is the Hebrew name for the Red Sea. One possible translation of “yam suf” is “sea of reeds”, and there is widespread speculation that Exodus may have been referring to some other sea of reeds besides the Red Sea. Some people have suggested that the sea we know as the Red Sea may in fact have been named “Yam Suf” in Hebrew precisely because it was confused with the sea described in Exodus. In any event, the association of the name “Yam Suf” with the place we call the Red Sea is very ancient, as is the association of the Exodus with the place we call the Red Sea.
From what I can tell, there are only two significant reasons for thinking “yam suf” in the Book of Exodus does not refer to the Red Sea. One is the implausibility of the Israelites actually crossing the Red Sea. This obviously presupposes that there is a historical basis for the story, but that it is entirely naturalistic. It seems at least as plausible to me that the story has little or no historical basis and that the Red Sea was chosen as the location precisely because it would be so dramatic.
The other reason is that “Sea of Reeds” (or “Reed Sea”) seems like an unlikely description for the Red Sea (though not any more unlikely than “Red Sea,” I would think!), and so it must have been some other body of water, whose name later got transfered to the Red Sea by accident. This strikes me as perfectly plausible but far from compelling.
In any event it is simply false that most serious scholars contend that Moses crossed the Reed Sea and not the Red Sea. Every scholar would agree that “yam suf” can be translated “Reed Sea,” but there is no consensus on what body it actually refers to. Frankly, any serious scholar worth listening to would tell you that we just don’t know.
