I agree with what romanian philosopher Emil Cioran (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Cioran) says about Paul in his book La tentation d'exister (The Temptation to Exist):
(translation mine)
We will never blame him enough for having turned Christianity into an inelegant religion, by introducing in it the more detestable Old Testament traditions: intolerance, brutality, provincialism. With what indiscretion does he meddle in things he shouldn’t be concerned with, things he doesn’t have a clue about! His remarks on virginity, abstinence and marriage are frankly repugnant. Responsible of our religious and moral prejudices, he has set the norms of stupidity and multiplied the restrictions that still paralyze our instincts.
Of the ancient prophets he doesn’t have the lyricism nor the elegiac and cosmic accent, rather the sectarian spirit and what they had of bad taste, jabber, rambling. His interest for the citizens habits is immense. As soon as he talks about them, you sense him vibrating with naughtiness. Obsessed by the city, by the one he wants to destroy and by the one he wants to build, he cares less about the relationship between man and God than he does about the relationship among men. Read carefully his famous Epistles: you will never find an instant of relaxation and gentleness, of meditation and nobility; everything in them is furor, anxiety, cheap hysteria, incomprehension for knowledge, for the solitude of knowledge […] Sins, rewards, an accounting of vices and virtues. A religion without questions, an orgy of anthropomorphism. As to the God he offers us, I blush; disqualifying him is a duty […]
In embracing a doctrine that was foreign to him, a convert thinks he has made a step toward himself, while he is just trying to elude his problems. To escape lack of self-confidence – his chief feeling – he offers himself to the first cause chance presents to him. Once he possesses the “truth”, he will avenge himself over the others of his past insecurities, of his past fears. Such was the case of the emblematic converts, St. Paul. His magniloquent poses hardly concealed an anxiety that he tried to overcome without succeeding.
As with all newbies, he believed that with his new faith he would have changed his nature and won his hesitations, which he took care to say nothing about to his hearers. His game no longer deceives us. […] True, those were times when people looked for “truth”, they did not care about cases. If in Athens the apostle was ill-welcomed, if he found an environment insensitive to his ramblings, this is because there people still discussed and skepticism, far from abdicating, kept on defending his positions. Christian silliness could not catch on there; but it would seduce Corinth, city of slums, hostile to dialectics.
Common people want to be dazed by invectives, threats and revelations, by resounding talks: they love charlatans.
St. Paul was one, the more inspired, the more gifted, the more shrewd of antiquity. We still perceive the echoes of the noise he made. […] The sages of his time recommended silence, resignation, abandon, all impracticable things; more clever, he came with tasty recipes: those which save the mob and demoralize the frail ones. His revenge over Athens was complete. Had he triumphed there, perhaps his hate would have sweetened. Never had a setback a graver outcome. And if we are mutilated, struck, crucified pagans, pagans passed through a deep, memorable vulgarity, a two thousand years old vulgarity, we owe it to that setback. […]
A rotten civilization comes to terms with its evil, it loves the virus that corrodes it, no longer has self-respect, it leaves a St. Paul around… By this it declares itself defeated, worm-eaten, terminated. The carcass’ smell attracts and excites the apostles, cupid and talkative buriers.
A world of magnificence and splendor surrendered before the aggressiveness of these “enemies of the Muses”, of these madmen who, to this day, inspire a panic mixed with aversion. Paganism treated them with irony, a harmless weapon, too noble to submit a mob reluctant to nuances. The refined one who reasons cannot measure against the obtuse who prays.
