Did Paul Invent Christianity?

by smmcroberts 49 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  smmcroberts

  I think the answer is largely Yes. Please read my latest blog and see if you agree.

  The Witnesses had better stock up on goats and stones to make up for lost time!
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  glenster

  No.
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  snare&racket

  Not only did he make that sh*t up, he never even met Jesus! According to the bible itself, jesus came down from heaven to visit this murderer of christians. He claimed to see him on the road to damascus some decades after his death.Would this make his return in 1914 his third coming? (Fourth if you count pentacost and to diciples).

  What a coincidense, christianity was growing, he was known for killing christians and .....all of a sudden he met jesus, years after his death in some form of vision. Hmmm.... I wonder what really happened on that road to damascus? Maybe he came across some angry christians that recognised his murderous face.... "Now im a believer, i couldnt leave HIM, if I tried!"
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  OnTheWayOut

  You mention that Jesus never said the law ended, but that he came to fulfill the law. This was all very clever. No group of people ever lived under the complicated Mosaic Law- NO GROUP. Not the Jews nor the priesthood. A person here or there may have tried, but no group ever did it.

  So Paul and those after him had to invent a reason to put the law behind them. Good job.
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  jam

  Yes, I believe Paul invented Christianty. But I believe

  Paul exaggerated some things, like the JW,s today.

  Example: By birth he was a Roman, Act 22;28. But he talks

  about being beating by the rod. This was a punishment

  forbidden upon Roman citizens. The fact that he is able

  to appeal to Caesar (Act 25:11) for his final sentencing

  leads many scholars to believe that he was Roman, without

  citizenship paul would not have this right. So his claim of

  beatings by the rod is questionable.
• 

  WTWizard

  Paul codified it, reaffirming the homophobia and sex hang-ups while allowing torture, slavery, and proselytizing at all costs to continue.
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  jam

  A point I forgot to mention. Paul needed to make some

  drastic changes, (speculation on my part). He a Roman, the

  group that he is becoming a part of, Jews. I,am sure the Romans

  wasn,t very popular among the Jews. What if I join the KKK (a black man)

  and they wanted to make me a Grand wizard. Wait folks, we need to

  make some changes, you hate black people. He made changes.
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  Band on the Run

  I don't think the answer is capable of yes or no. Paul clearly was a powerful writer of the form of Christianity that is dominate in the western world. Other forms existed. I believe Jesus' early disciples believed that Christianity was a subset of Judaism. Paul's version could be exported to a wider world and survived for reasons that may have little to do with details. Gnosticism presented a different view.

  Paul's Christianity survived. I could not stand to hear the name "Paul" for a long time after the Witnesses. It made me want to throw up. Some of the most beautiful of his writings made me wretch. I could not read Paul as a primary source during college. After college, I forced myself. Most of the objectionable stuff in Paul was not written by him.

  Certainly, though, he was the principal theologian for what we know today as Christianity. I doubt that the Holy Spirit had much to do with his success. I also have a strong feeling that Paul might be repelled if he could see how Christianity evolved. Clearly, James and Peter were not captivated by Paul's gospel.

  I respect him now but involves cutting through everything I was taught or that was misconstrued by the Witnesses. Paul, for me, as a born-in, was against all fun and humanity. He was just a no-no judgmental woman hater.

  Believe it or not, I've actually purchased wall art with some of his scriptures for my home. My former self could not live with it.
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  Phizzy

  Paul heard a voice on the road to Damascus, and was convinced it was the resurrected Jesus who spoke to him. From that time on he associated with some followers of Jesus from time to time, and he spent many years in Arabia .

  He formulated his own Christology and that is what he preached, much of it appealing to Gentiles.

  How it differed from other strands of Christian belief is not easy to establish, with a number of those strands, called "Heretics" by the dominant christians of the time, we only know what they apparently believed and taught from writings that oppose them, such writings dealing only with the points of difference.

  The main body of what they believed is thus lost.

  So, Paul invented his own brand of Christianity, and the Roman Church certainly owes much to him,drawing on his teaching in large measure, the Orthodox and Coptic perhaps less so.

  I do agree with what you say in your blog, that Christianity as a seperate religion did not appear before Paul, the seeds of it may have been there, it seems as though some chose to meet away from the synagogue, but this may have been more pragmatism rather than an attempt to pull away from the jewish faith.

  After the destruction of the Temple in 70AD and the de facto end to the Jewish religion as it had been practised, there was a need to create something that would continue the faith, not allowing Mithras or any other god to take over, so the Gospel writers and Luke in Acts all writing post destruction, though perhaps drawing on previous writings as it suited them, wrote with the agenda of pushing the cult of Jesus forward to do just that, continue faith in "the one true God".

  I think any truly early christian, one who walked with Jesus, if he were to return today, would not recognise any of the extant religions that claim to follow Jesus as being even close to his teachings.
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  jam

  The Bible is divided into four different books.

  The OT, gospel, Paul,s writing and Revelation.