CC47: Hidden in Plain Sight: The Cunning of Paul

You may recall that in an earlier post I put forward the thesis that the Gospel of Mark was written as a direct rebuttal of Paul's First Corinthians ("The Gospel of Mark as a Rebuttal of First Corinthians," August 18, 2010). Today I'd like to talk about that in more detail.

Maybe you're thinking that sounds pretty boring, and you'll go read the sports page for a little blow-by-blow excitement. Bear with me, though. This story is packed with more drama than an NHL brawl combined with a daytime Soap Opera.

“Toews2010WinterOlympics” from Wikimedia Commons – author Rosie Perera – originally posted to Flickr as G9-20100221-3457

 
On one side, we have Team Salvation (blue and white). Team Salvation comes onto the ice first with the biggest, meanest lines you'd ever want to see. Paul is the Captain. His best forward is Luke and his strongest defenceman is Matthew. These guys have stamina and brute strength in spades. They're not nimble. They're not fast. Their wrist shot sucks. Their overall strategy is to slam the other team into the boards, start fights, and keep the puck moving fast so the audience has trouble following the play. They've done this many times before, and they're the crowd favourite, so they're convinced their strategy will work.

On the other side, we have a rookie team, Team Redemption (red and black). Team Redemption is late getting on the ice. Mark is the Captain. His forwards are unknown draft picks. But they're fast and smart and they skate and stickhandle like a young Wayne Gretsky. Team Redemption has only one line, but they play with everything they've got. They put their heart and soul into the game.

Paul scores an easy first goal, as he expected, but then Mark gets the puck. Mark is not like any of the opponents Paul has played before. Paul keeps trying to check him, but Mark seems to have wings on his skates, and he dekes the goalie to score three quick goals. Paul starts a fight and slams Mark's head into the boards. Mark won't quit. So Matthew gets the puck and moves the play across the centre line. It's offside, but the refs don't call it because they're paid on the sly by Paul's team. Mark's wingers retrieve the puck, score another goal with a beautiful slap shot. Paul is furious. He tells Luke to kill the clock until Team Redemption's line drops from exhaustion. Which they do.

Just for the thrill of it, Paul pummels every red jersey who drops to the ice.

Okay. That's the gameplay for the 1st century battle between Paul's team and Mark's team. Only the stakes were much higher for Paul and Mark, and the play was much more brutal than anything you'd see in a 1980's NHL game.

And you thought the New Testament was talking about boring ol' topics like peace, love, and hope!

The biblical book known as First Corinthians is a letter that was written by a confident "team captain." You can tell by the tone of the letter that Paul believes his preaching mission is going fairly well, despite some kinks that have be worked out with the Christian groups who live in the Greek city of Corinth. He's sure of his own authority. He describes himself in glowing terms as "like a master builder [who] laid a foundation" (1 Cor. 3:10). "For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ."

In other words, Paul, the master builder, has chosen as the foundation for all his authority, all his church building, and all his theology one man whom he calls Jesus Christ. This man Jesus is already dead. So Paul figures he can use this man's name and this man's "face" with impunity.

For a while, he gets away with it. (Goal #1). But he doesn't count on a direct challenge to his fabricated claim about "the Christ." He doesn't count on copies of his letter to the Corinthians ending up in Palestine. He doesn't count on somebody -- a somebody who knows a lot about the actual Jesus in question -- reading the copied letter and objecting vehemently to the content. He doesn't count on this somebody writing a searing point-by-point rebuttal of Paul's claims. He doesn't count on the courage of a man who wants to tell the truth about the life and teachings of Jesus son of Joseph.

By the time Mark writes his rebuttal in the early to mid 60's (a few years before the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem Temple), Paul himself can't do anything about it. (He seems to have stopped writing in the late 50's, and we don't know for certain what happened to him.) But his successors can do something to undermine the dangerous assertions made by Mark. They can take Mark's manuscript and do a hatchet job on it, cutting and pasting the various fragments into new compositions (the Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel of Luke), new compositions that change the original meaning and intent of Mark's portrayal of Jesus. They can try to force a blue and white jersey onto a physician scholar who was clearly playing for the red and black team, and if they're lucky, the audience will be so confused by the changing scorecard that they won't contest the final score of the game.

Based on the lasting success of Paul's strategy, along with his successors' strategies in the orthodox Western Church, I'd say his plan was quite effective. Ruthless. Heartless. Cruel. Inhumane. But very, very effective.

CC27: Jesus: The Anti-Status Teacher

There is currently no major world religion that bases its doctrines and spiritual practices on the teachings of the man who once lived as Jesus.

There are several world religions that owe a significant doctrinal debt to ancient Egyptian mystery cults. There are several world religions that would not be recognizable in their current form without the legacy of ancient apocalyptic groups. There are several world religions that have incorporated the teachings of ancient Wisdom literature into their texts. But there are no major world religions that approach the deep questions of spirituality and relationship with God in the way that Jesus approached these concerns.

This isn't new. At the time Jesus was teaching and healing, many different religions and philosophies were competing with each other to attract devoted followers. Many of these "pagan" religions were quite successful, far more successful than the modest house churches that sprang up in response to Jesus' message. So successful were these "pagan" religions, in fact, that in the end they won out over the teachings of Jesus.

Most Christians believe it's the other way around, that Christianity's "truth" won out over paganism's "heresy." But orthodox Western Christianity isn't based on the teachings of Jesus. It's based on the teachings of Paul and his vigilant successors -- men such as the author of Matthew and the author of Luke-Acts (whose writings were decreed canonical), and men such as Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Cyprian of Carthage (whose early Christian writings helped shape orthodox thought). These men took the ancient teachings of the mystery cults, the apocalyptic groups, and the Wisdom sages, and repackaged them -- rebranded them -- into a "new and improved" religion called Christianity.

So while early orthodox Christianity had everything to do with Christ -- an ancient saviour figure who was central to Egyptian, Persian, and Greek mystery cults -- early orthodox Christianity had nothing to do with the teachings of the physician-scholar named Jesus son of Joseph. In fact, the doctrines promoted by Paul and the men of the "apostolic succession" are the antithesis of Jesus' teachings about God.

Paul wanted desperately to preserve the ancient teachings of the mystery cults, the apocalyptic groups, and the Wisdom sages because these three approaches to religion, though very different from each other on the surface, all share one fundamental feature: they encourage people to become addicted to status.

Paul offered people a new religion that gave them "bonus points" in their drive for status. Paul promised people more status, extra status, new and improved status, special status, irrevocable status. It's a status-addict's dream! 

Jesus, meanwhile -- as evidenced in the Gospel of Mark, the reconstructed Q source, and parts of the Letter of James -- desperately wanted to get rid of the ancient teachings of the mystery cults, the apocalyptic groups, and the Wisdom sages. Why? Because he understood that widespread addiction to status was the single greatest impediment to people's understanding of God.   

"If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gang or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body to be burned, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends (1 Corinthians 13: 1-8a)." Shown here is Hawthorn Cottage in Kingston, ON. It was built of sturdy limestone in 1866 to house a family of villagers; eventually, it became part of the Pittsburgh branch of the Kingston Frontenac Public Library. It may not be the grandest of buildings, but its simple elegance has long served its families and its community with enduring comfort. Photo credit JAT 2020.

You've probably heard the biblical saying that it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God (Mark 10:25). This is usually interpreted as a condemnation of money and wealth, the idea being that if you give away all your money and wealth, you'll be closer to the kingdom of God.

This is too simplistic. "Rich" people can give away all their money and wealth, and still not feel God's presence because all they've done is exchange one form of status addiction (wealth acquisition) for another form (asceticism, a.k.a. purity acquisition). Money per se isn't the problem. Money can be used for hospitals, schools, meal programs, and so on. It's not money that's the root of all evil -- it's status addiction.

The only way for people to feel God's ongoing presence in their lives is for them to acknowledge their addiction to status and to make a commitment to heal this addiction.

It goes without saying that status addiction is rampant in our society. It's not an easy thing to heal (about as easy as that camel going through that narrow gate). But it can be done. To be free of status addiction is to be kind and loving towards others in the guileless manner of a young child.

For this reason, Jesus compares those who want to enter the kingdom of God to little children (Mark 10:13-16). Young children haven't yet been taught to hate others on the basis of class, race, or gender. They haven't yet been taught that they're "better" than others, that they're more loved by God than others, that God will save them and their families but not others. They haven't yet absorbed the cultural norms of competition, superiority, perfectionism, or purity (all forms of status addiction). Young children are still free. They still have free will. They still have the ability to love. They still have the ability to forgive. They still have the courage to look at other people and see them as people, not as slaves, property, or lesser beings.

A young child knows nothing of Law or Covenant (both of which are hopelessly interwoven with status). Nor does a child care about "whole burnt offerings and sacrifices" (Mark 12:33). What a young child cares about is love -- love that's infused with respect, and dignity, and egalitarianism, and empathy, and mature relationship, and simple kindness. Love that doesn't boast (since boasting is food for status addiction). Love that doesn't presume to prophesy (since prophesying is food for status addiction). Love that doesn't claim to be centred in the Mind (since pure logic is food for status addiction). Love that doesn't punish the body through ascetic practices (since asceticism is food for status addiction). Love that never seeks revenge (since revenge is to status addiction what crack cocaine is to substance abuse). Love that can't be taken away or withheld as a form of punishment. Love that isn't co-dependent. Love that isn't synonymous with "obedience." What a young child wants is love that forgives. Love that's . . . well . . . divine. 

What children need, and what they in turn give to others, is divine love -- the kind of love our God (God the Mother and God the Father) feel for all their children. The kind of love that Jesus wrote about in a text that Paul subsequently "borrowed" for his letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 13:1-8a).* The kind of love the orthodox Western Church doesn't teach you about.

This is a love based on the power of the soul, the power of free will, the power of forgiveness, and the power of redemption. It has nothing to do with sin, separation, sacraments, and salvation. It's a love that can be difficult for human beings to understand. It's a love that can be difficult for adults to master (the whole "camel squeezing through the narrow gate" thing). But once it's yours, nobody -- not even an angry Church cleric or an angry Temple priest -- can take it away from you, because it's a sacred trust that exists between you and God.

It's a sacred trust that fills you with wonder, and devotion, and gratitude, and humbleness. It's a sacred trust worth dying for, as the man named Jesus once knew. It's a sacred trust that opens the door to the kingdom of God while you're living here as a somewhat confused but unquenchably hopeful human being on Planet Earth.

The keys to the kingdom are not found in the person of Jesus. The keys to the kingdom are found in the teachings that Jesus introduced to anyone who wanted to listen to his annoying and exasperating attacks on the status quo.

If you're a Christian, and you want to start to work on the problems of status addiction in your own life, you're going to have to let go of the doctrine that Jesus is your Saviour. This doctrine is food for your status addiction. There is no Saviour. You don't need to be saved, because God don't make no junk. There's nothing wrong with your soul. Your soul is just fine, thank you very much.

It's okay to think of Jesus as a teacher and mentor in the same way you think of Mahatma Gandhi or the Dalai Lama or Martin Luther King, Jr., as inspiring teachers and mentors. But please don't put Jesus on a pedestal. That's the last thing he'd want anybody to do. 

Jesus wasn't trying to teach his followers about himself. That would have been the height -- the very pinnacle -- of status addiction. He was trying to teach his followers about God the Mother and God the Father. He was trying to take out the "middle men" -- the prophets, priests, and philosophers -- whose grandiose, narcissistic musings about the One God had made it all but impossible for anyone to have a loving, trusting, forgiving relationship with the God who is Two.

If the church of the third millennium wants to follow the teachings of Jesus, it must let go of its apocalyptic, mystery-ridden, wisdom-elevated "Saviour," and shift its focus to God. Now there's a radical idea.

* It's fashionable these days for theologians and biblical scholars to express their profound regret that Jesus wrote nothing down because he was an illiterate Galilean carpenter who spoke only Aramaic. This is nonsense. No lasting Indo-European movement has ever got off the ground without an articulate, knowledgeable leader and a written record of the movement's main tenets. To those scholars who insist that Jesus couldn't write down his own original and penetrating observations about God, healing, and psychodynamics, I want to say, "Get a life , , , and a history book!"

CC13: Choosing Between Paul and Jesus

Orthodox Western Christianity (both Catholic and Protestant) would like to have its Paul and keep its Jesus, too. But as the old maxim about keeping cakes and eating them reminds us, we have to make a decision. The church of the third millennium is going to have to throw in its lot with either Paul or Jesus. It can't have both.

The United Church of Canada is valiantly struggling to cobble together Paul's theology with Jesus' praxis. This would allow them to keep their Articles of Faith (which ultimately originate in Paul's Christ teachings) while "freshening things up" on the social justice front (thus allowing them to claim unity with Jesus' teachings).

You can't blame them for trying. But a continuing pattern of downward membership in the UCC speaks quite eloquently to the "success" of their patchwork solution.

The Mission and Service initiatives of the United Church are important, and I'm not trying to undermine them (well, not the service part, anyway). This is the best part of the UCC experience, as far as I'm concerned. But the theology . . . I can't abide the theology. The blunt truth is that the theology is driving me away from the church. I love the sense of community in my church, I love the people there, I love the commitment to volunteering, and I especially love the way in which children are uplifted. But I have to sit there and listen to readings from Paul, and I'm not happy about this

"Then his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and called him. A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, 'Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.' And he replied, 'Who are my mother and my brothers?' And looking at those who sat around him, he said, 'Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother'" (Mark 3: 31-35). This delicate Hellenistic gold wreath, dated to the 3rd century BCE, is on display at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. According to the ROM, such wreaths, often representing laurel, olive, or oak leaves, were placed in Greek burials as expressions of reverence for the dead. Photo credit JAT 2017.

Rather, I should say I'm not happy about the way the church tries to insist that Paul and Jesus were simpatico. Paul and Jesus were anything but.

These two men had dramatically different things to say about God. They had dramatically different goals in mind when they tried to spread their respective teachings. They had almost nothing in common except a childhood strongly influenced by Jewish teachings.

Paul doesn't write much in his letters about his own life. (Acts of the Apostles is a secondary source, probably written three decades or so after Paul's last known letter, Romans. Acts, which gives us far more information about Paul's life than Paul himself gives us, was written by the same man who wrote the Gospel of Luke.) Paul himself doesn't actually describe the famous conversion experience on the road to Damascus. The famous story of Saul struck blind by a light from heaven is only found in Acts 9:1-9; 22:6-11; 26:12-18.

For Paul, a mere conversion experience as an adult wasn't good enough. Rather than saying he was brought to Christ through a vision from Jesus, Paul actually makes a much more radical claim for himself: Paul was so special in the grand scheme of things that God "set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace . . . so that I might proclaim [his Son] among the Gentiles" (Galatians 1:15-17). Paul says he was chosen by God while he was still in the womb, just as prophets of old in the Jewish scriptures had been chosen.

Note: Paul has placed himself at the top of a very small and very select group of people -- the prophets. Nobody who truly believes that God treats all people equally would make such a presumptuous claim about himself or God. Paul, according to his own testimony, has provided himself with an impressive pedigree. Yet most biblical commentators fail to note that in the first century CE, as in the third millennium, an impressive pedigree means nothing to people who aren't driven by the needs of status addiction. Pedigree doesn't sway people who truly believe that all creatures are equal in God's eyes. Paul says that all people are one in Christ, but Paul means that some people are more important to God than others -- starting with himself.

Christian authors such as John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed have bent over backwards to try to prove to modern audiences that Paul really was "a saint not only for then, but for now and always" (page 413 of In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom, A New Vision of Paul's Words and World (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004)). In their book, Crossan and Reed try to minimize the brutality of the Letter to the Romans (which, of the letters we still have from Paul, is probably the letter that was written last). And they insist that Paul's Saviour is identical to the man who taught and healed as Jesus of Nazareth.

Whoever wrote the Gospel of Mark a few years after Paul's last known letter was clearly trying to refute what Paul had been writing about the man named Jesus. There's no other way to explain the vast differences in their respective portraits of Jesus. I think it's naive to suggest that the author of Mark didn't know about Paul's teachings, which predated Mark's in both time and influence. Paul admits he visited Jerusalem and met with Jesus' brother James (Galatians 1:18-19), and Paul claims he travelled widely in the Eastern Mediterranean. Can we really imagine that Mark, who knew so much about the details of Jesus' actual life, knew nothing at all about Paul's strategy to co-opt Jesus as the new face of the anti-emperor Saviour?

Barrie Wilson covers many of these points in the book I mentioned on March 6/10, How Jesus Became Christian. If you want to know more about the background historical elements of this complicated first century CE saga, I recommend Wilson's book (although, for the record, I don't agree with Wilson's comments on the Gospel of Matthew).

Paul had a plan and a mission. But it was not a plan to spread Jesus' dangerous teachings. It was a plan to minimize and control the subversive effects of Jesus' dangerous teachings.

It was a plan to eradicate the rapidly spreading story about a man from an aristocratic family who voluntarily gave up his status, his wealth, and his family connections in order to serve the poor in small towns because he was an educated God-loving scholar-physician (cf. Doctors Without Borders).

Can't have the nobility slumming it, you know. It might just catch on.

God forbid that regular people might start to believe that real, live, flesh and blood, aristocratic males could WANT to give up all that power and status, and live a life of humble service to God!

How to fix the problem? Great idea -- put the man back on a pedestal, only this time make the pedestal so tall that nobody else can reach it, or even want to reach it.

That'll keep them in their place . . . .

For me, this subtext is audible every time I hear a reading from one of Paul's epistles. It makes me want to gnash my teeth, shake my head, and bellow out loud, "Come on -- Paul is lying to us."

But, since none of these reactions would be considered popular at church during worship, my solution is to stop attending worship. I've decided to hang out with God in Nature, in song, in kind words, and in the people I love until such a time as the church decides to follow the teachings of Jesus instead of the teachings of Paul.

I sure do miss UCC Coffee Time, though!