Inspired by this thread.
What if St. Paul had never been converted on the road to Damascus, but remained a mainstream Jew? How much did his personal stamp change the young faith? How would Christianity’s doctrines, scriptures, spread, and organization have developed without his influence?
There were some early Christian sects (including the Ebionites and the Nazarenes) which rejected “Pauline Christianity”. I don’t know if any such survive today.
I don’t know for sure about the faith itself, but Paul was tireless in spreading the faith, and keeping those places where it had a foothold on the right path. You could make an argument that Christianity itself might have died out without Paul.
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Believe it or not, there’s also a surviving sect called the Mandaeans which rejects Jesus, but believes John the Baptist was a true prophet, or the Messiah.
Probably it, or some sect ancestral to it, was around in Jesus’ time – which might explain why the authors of the Gospels made sure to include those bits about, “He was not the Light but came to bear witness to the Light” and “I have need to be baptized of you, and you come to me?” Those passages always truck me as protesting a bit too much. But if John were widely known to have baptized Jesus, that might have been something John’s followers used to refute the Christians’ claim to Jesus’ divinity/messiahood. So the Christians had to include some counter-propaganda in their scriptures.
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First, it would be much more “Jewish” in attitude. Second, it would seem far more like a Fertile Crescent religion than today’s Greco-Romano-Celtic-Germanic-overlay doctrinal system does.
While Paul is classically called “the Apostle to the Gentiles,” and saw himself in that light (there are a number of NT quotes that make good cites for this), Matthias and the Eleven survivors of the Twelve did do a lot of outreach. Expressed as present-day countries, areas we know they and other followers connected with independently of Paul include Syria, Lerbanon, Armenia, Iraq, probably Iran, Pakistan (survivors in Kerala, India), Egypt, Ethiopia, and Libya. There appear also to have been small groups of Christians in several larger cities of the Roman Empire before the Paul of Tarsus Evangelistic Association Crusade came to town; Philippi, Corinth, and Rome come quickly to mind as examples.
But it was Paul who worked out the theology of salvation by grace as God’s free gift accepted through faith in Jesus that has characterized so much of Christian evangelism ever since. Without Paul, Christianity would be much more focused on the haggadah/parable style of teaching, the intimate relationship between belief and action in one’s own life that characterizes much of Judaism, and perhaps a bit more “mystery religion” flavor as it interacted with Attisism, Mithraism, etc.
That bizarre God-vs.-Devil dualism that has afflicted historical Christianity? I dunno for sure, but Ahriman is tempting me to say that Masdaistic influence would be much stronger, and lead to even more of it than exists today.
It would be much less rational and dogmatic (in the technical senses of those words, not the critique-of-though one that usually prevails in GD) than the historical faith has been.
Those are some initial thoughts.
In addition to Lerbanon, the land of the Lerbites to which scribes who make typographical errors are banished, I meant to say Lebanon. ::: blush :::
John was running a mikvah, a Jewish ritual bath. Having had both done, I’m curious how the mikvah came to be baptism.
This article discusses that question but doesn’t really answer it.
Christianity would be a small sect in Isreal, about like the Essenes were or the Samaritains.
What would Christianity have been like without St. Paul?
Minneapolis.
One way to look at this question is to read the New Testament with the books written by Paul removed, which is what some here seem to be answering.
But how were the writers of the gospels (especially the writer of Mark, since the others were derived from it) influenced by Paul? Had Paul not written his epistles, would the gospels even have been written? Or were they written independently of Paul’s writings?