New Testament and Christian Ethics: Christ’s Morality or Paul’s?

Truth

New Testament and Christian Ethics:Christ’s Morality or Paul’s?

Abstract

Who should be believed? The Christian believes Christ to be God, so there is no question about it. Paul isa man, Christ is God! Why do Christians believe Paul and ignore God, even making excuses. Christianswant to be saved, and want to be saved without effort on their own part. Paul makes salvation effortless.Faith is sufficient. For Christ—God—you have to do something—love other people. Faith may helps thebeliever to have psychological confidence in God in doing so. But devoting your life to loving and caringfor others is what saves, not faith alone. Christians listen to Paul, the Antichrist, rather than to “every wordthat procedeth from the mouth of God” (Mt 4:4). Still Christians hearken to Paul. From their abandonmentof His direct teaching, Christians hate God. The have chosen the Devil and his Antichrist rather than Godand Christ. They are Paulians not Christians, and their religion is Paulianity not Christianity. The clergypromote Pauline Christianity to keep their platters full—they do not want to startle the sheep.

© Dr M D Magee, Contents Updated: Friday, 30 September 2011

What is a Christian?Love, the Law and the Old TestamentSalvation by Love or Faith?Harmony in the BibleChrist’s MessageAngst and ApocalypsePaul’s TeachingLove, Faith and Omnipotence“Paulianity” as a Mystery ReligionThe End of TimeThe Roman MilieuPaul and “Paulianity”Criteria of JudgementSexualityLove the Greatest Virtue

What is a Christian?

Opinion polls published by such as Pew, Gallup and Baylor in recent years haveshown the poverty of the self proclaimed “Christian Nation”’s knowledge. At onetime, what was considered to be over 90 percent of the US population were proud tobe called Christians. That headline figure has fallen considerably but is still high.However, more refined studies have shown that most of that supposed 90 percent ofUS Christians do not have a clue about their own beliefs. They will proclaim the bibleas the inerrant word of God, but a simple question like “What is the first book in thebible?” cannot be answered by a large proportion of those who profess absoluterespect for a supposed divine book—the disciples of Christ! In fact, a small number ofsuch questions serve to prove that less than 20 percent of the population of the“Christian Nation” can really be Christians—only that small number know enough

New Testament and Christian Ethics: Christ’s Morality or Paul’s?

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about the religion to be able to know what is necessary to be a Christian.

It follows that, in practice, the US hardly differs from other modern secular countriesin having only a small proportion of religious believers among its ranks. The resteither do not accept or practice any religion, or only vaguely accept a god, a spiritworld and an afterlife, but otherwise live purely secular lives. What distinguishesAmericans is the stronger peer pressure to conform with an American ideal, part ofwhich is being committed to Christianity. Americans think they ought to beChristians to be good Americans, so they say they are, even though they do not knowenough about it to even qualify. Indeed, what they think in general betrays theircomplete misunderstanding of Christ, whom, in his moral values, they simply assumeto have been a typical American himself.

Now, given that around three quarters of US Christians know very little Christianity,it can come as no surprise that Americans rarely show the least bit of mercy towardsothers. Americans as a mass are vengeful killers, and it never seems to occur to themthat they might be killing the wrong people—innocent people—just as the Christianstory has it that Jesus himself was innocent and was wrongly killed. They have hardlyprogressed from how many were 100 years ago when they thought it proper to savethe efforts of judges by stringing up black men as the strange fruit of local trees. Theyeffortlessly judge someone else as a “bad guy” and that is what they perforce arewithout the need for the proper process of law, or, given the chance of due process,prejudice gives assurance that no defense can succeed for them. When the medialabel as “bad guys” someone foreign, it goes without saying that they are, and deserveto be bombed, and their assets stripped, as a punishment for seeming bad to theaverage US Christian.

It is all understandable because these US Christians have no idea of what “mercy”means. You need to have read the New Testament gospels to get the message passedon by Christ that Christians must be merciful, they must not personally rush tojudgement, and must ensure that their own vision is clear before they criticizesomeone else’s view. All of this is written plainly in the gospels, is not difficult to getthe gist of, and was once the basis of Christian morality taught in schools and sundayschools. Jesus was not prescribing a legal system—Jews already had a God givenlaw—but ways ordinary people could behave in practise that ensured they livedaccording to God’s law. Yet without reading what Jesus taught, how is anyone toknow what his teaching was?

The lazy so-called Christian will say their pastor told them all about it, but they thenhave to know their pastor was telling them the truth, and they can be sure of that onlyby reading it for themselves, without their pastor telling them what it means. Pastorsmight be deliberately lying for reasons of greed or politics, or they might simply bemisinformed themselves because they have trusted the false guidance of their ownteachers. The reliance of Protestant America on this caste of liars and opportunistsfor their understanding of Christ and his message negates the main achievement ofthe Protestant Reformation—the liberation of the ordinary citizen from the power ofthe priest by placing the bible before them in their own natural language, and invitingthem to see for themselves what Christ had said and done. The Reformation was atransient revolution, the old Catholic priesthood being replaced by a new caste ofersatz priests instead called pastors and ministers but doing the same as the medievalCatholic priesthood—telling the layperson what to think.


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So the ordinary US Christian rarely has any other than a benighted view of thethoughts, words and deeds of Christ and how he introduced a new practical approachto human morality, that of love of others. Instead the benighted ones weremisinformed that they inherited the promised eternal life just by deciding that itsounded good enough for them to want it. They were told just to declare themselvesas Christian and God is fool enough to believe them. They need not have been soeasily taken for a ride. All they had to do was to verify that their money grubbingpastors had properly informed them what Christ had to say about it by reading it forthemselves. They do need to use some intelligence in doing it, and that is anotherproblem for many of the benighted, though most ought to be able to understand whatis an essentially very simple message.

Love, the Law and the Old Testament

The Christian regards Christ, ostensibly a man, as none other than God in humanform. It follows that the words of Christ recorded in the gospels ought to carryexceptional weight in understanding the meaning of the Christian religion. Theeducated Christian knows that these books were written down by human beings,fallible people, many years after the event, so they cannot be considered to benecessarily Christ’s precise words, but the sentiment is usually clear and simple, andthe same sentiment is usually repeated in the record of Christ’s sayings in differentplaces, and in different words, but still the recorded words of God resounding fromthe mouth of the man with whose body He had fused. Only occasionally can thesewords be doubted on grounds of being suspected interpolations—when they stand outas being contrary to the teaching reported generally, or when they defy the knownhistorical circumstances of the time but match those of the church at a later date—butsuch judgements need a more careful study than is possible from an initial reading.

What can be appreciated at a first reading is that Christ is remembered not as aconventional Jewish teacher. The gospels go out of their way to show that Jesus wasnot repeating orthodox Judaism, but rather was offering a new and memorableunderstanding of the Jewish law, considered by Jews as God’s law, but nonethelessstrict and demanding. The reader of the gospels will find that Jesus was not declaringGod’s strict law wrong, but was proposing an all together more natural and lesslegalistic way of applying it in practise. So, he was not teaching what the Jewishscriptures had taught—the law! He was teaching what everyone should do to meetwhat was most important in the law, its purpose—to be kind and caring to otherpeople—to love them!

If Christ were God, as Christians are supposed to believe, he could not have beenabrogating the law of Moses because it was His law as God, but anyone reading theChristian Old Testament, which is most of the Jewish scriptures, can see that lots ofpetty ordinances had been introduced, often simply to boost the take home pay of thetemple priesthood. Many such laws have nothing to do with how humanbeings—Jews in this case—should behave to please God. They have little to do withmorals. Christ’s new criterion of love was to miss out all the priestly gerrymanderingwith the law, and to put before people a straightforward, commonsensical measurethat everyone could easily appreciate, and apply to bring them within spirit andintention of the laws that God had previously specified, but had been obfuscated.


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For this reason, it must be quite wrong to do the opposite—to seek out bits of the OldTestament and use them as weapons against people. That Christ came not to abolishthe law but to fulfil it does not mean, as ill-spirited, financially and politicallymotivated pastors and Christians so-called make out that Christ’s new criterion wasadded, as a new feature, to the law of the Old Testament and often subordinated to it,but rather that the new criterion of love itself fulfilled all the requirements of theJewish law. Love of others does not abrogate the law, it fulfils it, but in so doing itfilters the older laws and commandments of the Jewish scriptures, so that thosewhich do not meet the criterion of love are filtered out, leaving only those that domeet it. Incompatible laws in the Old Testament are rendered moribund, and theothers are subject to the primacy of Christ’s new law, where there is any doubt.

So, although it has always been absurd to pick on some Old Testament ordinances asabsolutely true still, despite being opposed to the law of love, others which absolutelymatch up to the law of love are ignored. Adultery is a capital crime in the Jewishscriptures, just as homosexuality is, but bigoted Christians choose to hatehomosexuals on the basis of the Old Testament, and contrary to the law of love,though many of them are adulterers deserving similar hatred, in its absence.Elsewhere the Jewish scriptures requires Jews to be perfect as God is perfect, but thatis far too hard for most Christians to accept, though Jesus repeated it. The OldTestament is intended to be background reading for the devout Christian, meant toshow the new morality as superior to the vengeful faddiness of the legal elaborationsof the Jewish scriptures.

Salvation by Love or Faith?

The readers of the New Testament should note how their priests and pastors haveelevated the writings of a man called Paul—a mere man, not a god, who began hiscareer oppressing the early followers of Christ—to a higher level of importance thanthe reported words of God Himself, uttered when He was incarnated as Christ! Paulwas the very first modern pastor, a man who saw the chance of a following and a fastbuck by telling everyone what Christ meant—and they believed him, not those ofChrist’s words that were preserved, thereby negating the intentions of God!Christianity changed from aiming to practise what Christ preached to practising whatPaul preached, not the same thing at all.

Given that the two approaches do differ, who should be believed? The Christianbelieves Christ to be God, so surely there is no question about it. Paul is a man, Christis God! Why then do Christians believe Paul and ignore God, even making excuseswhy they do, when they are clever enough to notice. It is because Christians want tobe saved, and want to be saved without effort on their own part. Paul makes salvationeasy—effortless. For him, faith is sufficient. For Christ—God—you have to dosomething—love other people. Faith is no substitute for doing it, although it helps thebeliever to have psychological confidence in God in doing so. Living the life of Christ,devoting your life to loving and caring for others, is what saves, not faith alone.

As James points out in his epistle—which the Christian should consider an essentialclarification of the relationship of love and faith expressed by a man who knew Jesusintimately—faith alone is useless, it serves no one. All it does is give the egos ofbelievers an unmerited boost, and leave them with the false belief that they are saved


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even though they have made no effort at all to do what Christ required. Luther, andmodern Protestant pastors, who have effectively deified Paul, disregard James’s letteras “an epistle of straw” because it utterly refutes Paul’s Antichristian teachings—thetype of false Christianity they rely on to give them false status in an Antichristiansociety, and a comfortable living if not considerable riches donated by theircongregations, desperate to have their existential anxiety nominally assuaged. Theyare moral vampires.

Having read the gospels and the epistle of James, having understood what Christ wasgetting at—that salvation involved effort, the effort of showing mercy and compassionto other people—the reader can hope to understand the New Testament in its owncontext, a study that requires knowledge beyond that of the bible, and thenappreciate how the distortions of Paul and the early gentile bishops changed thereligion while it was still an infant lost in the Roman empire. Being a Christianrequires not just effort in helping everyone who needs it, and being a pleasant humanbeing, but also needs study especially to understand where it went wrong—how theAntichrist, Paul, made a moral outlook into a mystery religion, whereby faith insalvation equated with being saved, and how that became a tool of the establishmentand a career choice for social leeches and opportunists, the professional Christians,and the very opposite of Christ’s teaching.

Yes, the New Testament teaching of the apostle, Paul, is the antithesis of Christ’s aim,yet modern pastors cite Paul far more often than they cite the recorded words ofChrist. It shows that modern Christianity, especially Protestant Christianity is muchmore oriented towards what Paul had to say than towards what Christ had to say.Paul was the founder of Christianity as it is today, especially in the USA where thereal Jesus has all but disappeared beneath a Rambo gargoyle of him. So, Paul shouldbe ignored if Christ is to be understood. Anyone who doubts this should considerwhat could have been God’s purpose in appearing on earth as a man, if the thoughts,words and deeds of this man-God were to be immediately reinterpreted into theiropposite by an opportunist jumping onto what he perceived as a Christianbandwagon. He saw there was personally more to be gained with them than there wasopposing them.

Harmony in the Bible

If the traditional Pauline Christian argues that all of the bible is God’s word, he is leftwith the problem of what God incarnated for. After all, this God was, according toChristians, the creator of the universe for whom everything was possible, so whyappear, teach a new morality, do things to demonstrate it, and tell people it was atough call, only to have Paul, a mere man, countervail it by telling Christians thatmorality did not matter so long as they had faith. James corrected Paul—faith wasdead without Christian deeds. If faith did not manifest itself as the morality Christhad lived and breathed, then God’s incarnation was useless, and without it anyone’sprofessed faith was insincere. It was merely boastful pretense intended to fool othersor to delude themselves.

So, the Christian who reads the bible as if it were a uniform, cohesive book of moralguidance is at best naïve. Every biblical scholar knows it is a compilation of differentbooks, by different men writing at different periods in time, so it cannot be


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considered uniform. It has to be read with the knowledge that it is a mishmash, andthe Christian cannot claim to have faith in God as Christ without realizing that God’spurpose in appearing as a man was to correct the false beliefs that were rife. Thewords of Jesus necessarily take precedence over Paul’s and those in the OldTestament, but even the gospels themselves are by different hands, and also writtenat different times under differing conditions.

If God, allegedly as the Holy Ghost, could ensure that the multiple hands of the biblecould all miraculously convey the same message, then one has to wonder why thereare so many biblical sects—around 30,000—each of which finds something todisagree with in the ideas of the others, though all are based on the same “inerrant”texts. Mind you, one has to wonder why, if God can make people write a perfect bookin an imperfect world, He cannot make perfect people. “Free will” is always theanswer. People can choose to be bad. Yet the biblical authors apparently could notchoose to write anything untrue in the perfect books of the bible.

Then again, Christians, of their own free will, pray to be saved, they pray to be goodChristians, they pray to be perfect, like the perfect book. Yet those same peoplecomplain that people cannot be perfect in an imperfect world, unlike the book. Whycannot their prayer be answered? It is not that those Christians want to persist intheir sinful lives and their false beliefs. The point can only be that human beings haveto exert themselves to do right—they cannot rely on God to do everything for them,for that is an abrogation of free will. Prayer is a cop out, a denial of free will. Peoplehave to show, of their own will, that they want to do God’s will. They have to bewilling to show kindness and consideration to other human beings as human beings,any of whom—like Jesus—could be God, and have to be treated as if they are—evenenemies!

It is hard. But the reader of the gospel stories of Christ know he never said it would beeasy—quite the opposite. Paul’s greedy pastors made that claim to get easy andcompliant congregations who would keep them comfortable, or even rich!Unrighteous people are punished rather drastically, according to Revelation, so onemight have thought they would take more care to be sure they are doing what Christtaught them to do, and not some easy option that a local confidence trickster offeredinstead.

Treating the bible as a vade mecum fails to recognize that each of the authors in it,though writing from the standpoint of one tradition or another, also wrote asindividual people. The bible is not coherent. Fundamentalists try to concoct aspurious cohesion by a spurious exegesis in which separated and unconnected partsof the bible are assumed connected by a miraculous thread. The miracle is that somany people believe it. If it were true, like any allegorical interpretation of any book,no one can know what the intended interpretation was, once the original key is lost.

What happens then is that the interpreter puts his own interpretation into the text,not the intended one—in the bible’s case, not God’s, or the supposed overseer of thework, the Holy Ghost’s. The pastors just put together what suits them, and theChristian punters who can read Jesus’s words for themselves, are amazed that thesecret message has emerged, one which usually negates what Christ was teaching. Ifit does not, then the secret message is pointless, the direct message says it better.


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So, the supposed harmony of the bible is less an assumption than a lie. Why, oh whyshould a benevolent God want to make His central messages so obscure that only acaste of crooks and “get rich quick” shysters can read them? Why do people, whotrust the idea that God is mighty enough to create the whole universe, not trust theidea that He must therefore be capable of posting a message that is easy tounderstand? The Christian should trust that God can tell them what He wills,provided that they read it with a determination to understand it in its proper context.As the gospels—notably the first three synoptic gospels—are plain enough in meaningwithout interpreters, it can only be the grifters, the priests and pastors, who areconfusing the message to serve their own purposes—and Paul was the first of them.

Christ’s Message

If anyone wants to get Christ’s message from the bible, it makes sense to begin withwhat Jesus is recorded as having said, and what he did himself in the brief period ofhis life on earth narrated in the gospels, and in snippets elsewhere. A core Christianbelief is that Jesus was God incarnate, so whatever he said was the very word of Goduttered from His own human lips, the only caveats being:

Were his words remembered and reported correctly?1. Were some of his reported words not actually his, but later expedient beliefs of theearly Church put into his mouth to give them his authority?

2.

Mark, the first gospel, was not set down until the end of the Jewish War, around70 AD, at least 40 years after the crucifixion, a long time for speeches to beremembered accurately, but the synoptic gospels do not record continuous extendeddiscourses like the fourth gospel, a much later work of literary speeches not meant tobe accurate reporting. What Christians remembered were pericopes, memorablesnippets, epithets, maxims and parables. The seemingly long address called theSermon on the Mount in Matthew is really a collection of pericopes put together toseem like a speech. In other gospels, these pericopes are found elsewhere scatteredabout during Christ’s ministry. The earliest gospel, Mark, has no such long address,and Luke has a shorter collection called the Sermon on the Plain!

So, the reporting of the words of Christ are based on impression rather than clearlyrecollected situations. The individual pericopes are short and pithy enough to suggestthat they were memorable, and were remembered almost verbatim, but the originalsituation was lost, or, just as likely, the sayings were often repeated by Jesus indifferent situations so were not attached to any particular event. Though situationswere lost or did not uniquely exist, the moral sentiments expressed by the pericopescould hardly be mistaken, the words were so economical and memorable. The longentreaties and exhortations in John are fanciful creations of the author.

In some places, Jesus is made to say things that seem prophetic or incongruous in aparticular situation. It suits the idea that Jesus was God, just as his supposedmiracles do, but it goes against the belief that Christians are expected to hold thatJesus was wholely a man so that he could experience human suffering fully as a man.“A paradox and mystery”, supernaturalists would say, is that he neverthelessremained a God also! It is a circle to be squared by each believer for themselves, but itis certain that men cannot still storms or walk on water, and if we are invited to


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believe that this man could, then he could not simultaneously have been an ordinaryman, and that leaves us doubting that he could suffer as an ordinary man wouldsuffer—on a cross, for example.

However the Christian chooses to square that circle, it is incumbent upon us, injudging the validity of the reporting of his words to doubt the miraculous orprophetic, and that means we must suspect such passages as having been inserted bythe much later authors in their own belief that such things must have been said.Generally, though, like miracles, these doubts do not directly effect Jesus’s moralstatements. Mainly they are, like his miracles, meant to underline his divinity ratherthan his humanity, whereas morality is entirely concerned with humanity.

This too is where the historical sequence of the biblical books is important, for thewriters were not aiming to write in harmony with whatever others had written. Theearly church was not a united whole, and the authors of the various gospels andletters wrote at different times and places, intent, where they knew an earlier work,on correcting it and superseding it—as Matthew and Luke attempted to do withMark, and nearly led to its loss to the world—rather than necessarily harmonizingwith it. Thus James, the brother of the Lord, according to Mark 6:3, wrote apassionate letter intended to correct Paul’s aberrations. One might have thought thatthe brother of the incarnate God and head of the first Church in Jerusalem wouldhave had more authority than any man other than the incarnate God Himself, andmuch more than one who had never known God in the flesh, but only, by his ownadmission, in hallucinations. Yet James is universally disparaged, and Paul eulogizedby these curious Christians tempted into Antichristianity by the Devil intent onundermining God’s good work.

This latter, at least, is what they should think but do not. Rather they havesuccumbed to the Devil’s blandishments, look upon the world from a mountain peakand claim it as their own, throw themselves from the pinnacle of the temple confidentin their arrogance that God and His angels will save them through their nonsensical“faith alone” belief. All because they listen to Paul, the Antichrist rather than to“every word that procedeth from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). Only in thegospel passages recording those words does the Christian know any words thatliterally came out of the mouth of God. The brother of the lord, James, must haveheard many such words, and understood just what Jesus would have said when hereplied to Paul’s distortions, but still Christians hearken to Paul. It is plain from theirabandonment of His direct teaching that Christians hate God. The have chosen theDevil and his Antichrist rather than God and Christ.

This Antichrist was, of course, at work only a short while after the crucifixion, andlong before the gospels were set down, so his baneful influence is plain in them. Paul,for example, invented the Christian liturgy of the eucharist, which later appeared as ifreally said by Jesus in the gospels. Previously Jesus had known it as the MessianicMeal, in which he broke bread and shared food in fellowship on several occasions inhis recorded life, not least the so-called feeding miracles. Christ emphasized practicalmorality, while Paul emphasized supernatural mystery and sacraments.

Not that Jesus did not think in supernatural terms, he did. Like all of us, he was aman of his times and could only think in the ways that everyone then thought—interms of his worldview, the cultural outlook of those with whom he lived. But his


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morality was hands on. It was applied. It was not airy-fairy fancies, wishful thinking,prayers and promises. Disciples of Jesus had to behave in a prescribed way, as Jamesmakes clear. Faith and God were not disregarded for they helped stiffen the believer’sspine and their resolve, but the outcome was to be a Good Samaritan, to be a Christ!Paul has deliberately obfuscated the practical purpose of Christ’s teaching and modeof life.

Angst and Apocalypse

Fundamentalists make the schoolboy error of thinking that the authors of the biblicalbooks could write a universal and eternal way of living when they lived in times andplaces where particular ethics and attitudes were prevalent because they were theculture of the Jews taught to them all from birth. The emphasis on otherworldlinesswas a response to the uncertainty in the real world. In a few thousand years, thegeneral certainty and continuity of small group, tribal and village societies hadprogressively been destroyed by the expansion of empires, which themselves, thoughmighty were never stable for long, being dependent on militarism, and weredisruptive of traditional communal life, and increasingly marginalized the poor.

In the west, the Persian, Greek and then Roman empires subjected their people to anexistential angst through the destruction of eternal cultures and lifestyles, especiallyfor the uneducated poor. The withdrawal of people from reality was the result of thispersistent tendency. When the contentment that people had enjoyed for millenniahad disappeared, or was manifestly disappearing, a strong inclination arose to seeksolace in promises of happiness elsewhere. Intelligent and educated people in generaldid not fall for this temptation. They were not so anxious, having their privileges, andwere more reasonable from their education, preferring the philosophical lifestyles ofthe Stoics and Epicureans, and enjoying the ritual of state occasions. The poorwanted comfort and a promise of something better to reward their fear and anguishin this life. In short, just like today, pessimism about the future was rife.

The Persian religion, Zoroastrianism, of a few centuries before had introduced theidea of a linear as opposed to the natural cyclical view of history. The world wascreated by a benevolent god, went through several phases akin to the seasons of anannual cycle, and then ended! Thereafter God’s kingdom replaced the previousimperfect world, created perfect by the good God but spoiled by the wicked God.Notionally the wicked God could have been victorious, but the decisions of humanbeings to oppose him eventually swung the victory the way of the good God—or atleast that was the expectation. So people had to choose the good God if the world wasto end in a new perfect creation as opposed to destruction by the wicked one.

The era of Jesus was one when many people believed the End was nigh, and theJewish sect of Essenes, of whom Jesus was certainly one, were convinced of it.Judaism had an eschatological tradition it had received from the ZoroastrianPersians when they set up the Jewish temple state of Yehud. Though the subsequentrulers of Judah, the Greeks and Maccabees, edited from the Jewish scriptures muchof the original manifestly Persian apocalyptic content, it remained hovering in Jewishnon-canonical tradition, an apocalyptic literature which traditionalists, like theEssenes, revered, and so continued to be influential. This former Zoroastriantradition was also perpetuated in Gnosticism. Zoroastrianism influenced Christianity


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by both of these routes.

The pessimism of the age was reflected in the disdain of these eschatological beliefsfor the real material world, and the longing some had for it to end in the hope of aperfect world to come, a longing Christians were to keep alive for centuries afterJesus, waiting in the Garden of Gethsemane, expected it that very night.

Rome’s was a grossly unequal empire. Rich families were unbelievably rich while thepoor were often luckier if they were slaves. It was also an empire that relied onconquest. It was a military state. Modern capitalism relies on never ending growth ofproductivity, but then the Roman empire required never ending growth of conqueredpeoples. But just as productivity growth is getting harder today, conquest was gettingharder then. Invincible Roman legions were losing more battles, and the northerntribes driven west and south by the Huns coming from the east were getting harder tocontain along the empire’s long northern border. It was a great worry to Romans, richand poor alike, but some of the poor were beginning to think the end of empire mightbe no bad thing for them, and they began to welcome each fresh incursion of thebarbarians, and each new defeat by the legions. Each disaster hinted at the finalone—the End of the World!

The apocalyptic or messianic Jews called “Christiani” and the Gnostic sects had theireschatological theories derived from Zoroastrianism to explain it, and these beliefswere getting increasingly popular. Hidden in them were differences in the notion ofwhat happens at the End. Jewish apocalyptic envisaged the restoration of a purecreation and a new beginning of the real world. Gnostics generally thought thewicked world would be destroyed and souls would then gravitate towards the purelyspiritual God in a purely spiritual world. Hellenistic Jews like Paul seem to havecrossed the wires, and influenced by Paul, Christianity inclined increasingly towardsGnostic spiritualism, and remains there today.

The apocalyptic Jewish expectation was of a restored world led by pious Jews in akingdom of God, one of the notions they had from the Persians. The approach to theEnd Time therefore required Jews to strive to be perfect to be eligible for admissionto the future kingdom. Perfection could be had by being lifelong law-abiding Jews, orby sincere repentance of their sins followed by strictly adhering to the law until thekingdom came. That is what Christ taught and John the Baptist before him, and itremains the case for Christians today! The resurrection of Christ into worldly life wasthe proof that God’s restored creation, His kingdom, was beginning, and all righteousJews who had died would follow him, resurrected to live in the new world. Matthewdescribes it as an historical fact.

Gnostics had the idea that the world was wicked because it had not been created bythe good God at all, but by the wicked one, a self glorifying lesser god who pretendedto be God. The Jewish scriptures said the creator was the God of the Hebrews, so, forGnostics, He was the wicked god, and they rejected Him. It explained why the OldTestament YHWH was such a bully and a monster. The End came about when thedistant and purely spiritual God of All realized that his son, YHWH, had created asort of slave world, a material non-spiritual world, and he decided to destroy it andall its wickedness. At that moment, though, the souls of the good would be releasedfor them to return whence they came—return to God. As the material world waswicked, and its god was wicked, his prescriptions and commands were also wicked, so


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people were free to disobey them, and they took up a licentious lifestyle. Othersthought quite the opposite. They must reject and disdain everything in the materialworld, so they rejected sex between fleshly bodies, dressed in rags and ate minimally,living an ascetic life.

In the original Jewish speculation, the rulers of the restored world would be Jews,but Christians altered this belief from Jews to Christians on the grounds thatChristians were the new Israel. Of course, the first Christians were all Jews anyway,and the Deuteronomistic theme of Jewish foundation history was thatunrighteousness would always reduce Jews to a remnant, whereas righteousness ledto their being leaders of the world. So, the first Jewish Christians were Israel, therighteous remnant, and when Christianity spread into the empire amongstHellenized Jews, like Paul, and then godfearing gentiles, all accepted that theChristians were still the new Israel even though they were no longer all Jews, andeventually none were.

Paul’s Teaching

What then was to be their attitude to the Roman state? Paul, the so-called apostle tothe gentiles boasted he was all things to all men (1 Cor 9:22), an opportunist that hemight “gain the more”. He taught that sex ought to be disdained (1 Cor 7:29f) andmarriage was therefore unnecessary (1 Cor 7:26), but he rebuked Christians thatthought as the world was about to end there was no point in working (2 Thess 3:7). InRomans 13:1f, Paul also told his hearers to ignore the forthcoming End, in theirrelationship with the state, to pay their taxes and to fulfil all their legal requirements,though it all is soon to be rendered pointless. When you are convinced the world isgoing to end, what is the point of continuing to work? Paul condemned their wish todown tools—strike—until the kingdom come. It suggests he was as cynical as modernUS ministers and TV evangelists.

Paul was inconsistent. Rulers ruled with God’s approval (Romans 13:2) and on Hisbehalf. Yet in 1 Cor 6:1, Christians were told not to use Roman legal institutions tosettle their disputes. The End was nigh when Christians would rule and judge theworld. Meanwhile they had to forgo due process and practise settling their owndifferences. Paul was the first named Christian opportunist and sophist, ready toargue any line that suited him for the moment. If that is not so, then Paul’s lettersmust be just compendiums of contradictory letters by different Hellenisticmissionaries put together in the name of a single man—Paul.

Whatever and whoever the letters of Paul represent, no attempt is made in them topretend he is a god. Whatever he says, it is a fallible human opinion. However, Christin the gospels, Christians should believe, is a manifestation of Almighty God, whosewords should carry divine weight. The New Testament shows that the effectivedeification, or partial deification, of Paul by Christians is an heresy, and anunforgivable distraction from the sacred teachings recorded as coming directly fromGod’s own lips. Anyone who tries to get a coherent moral message from the NewTestament should appreciate that they are asking the impossible. Present day PaulineChristians attempt it by levering God—Christ—into Paul’s mould. To do this theyhave to ignore most of Christ’s own morality, and have to pretend Christ promisedeternal salvation to any criminal—sinner—who professes Christianity. When anyone


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points to the contradictions, they argue that circumstances have changed. Christ’smorality cannot apply today. Paul’s lack of it, of course, can! Christ was wrong butPaul was right. So, who is the Christian God?

However Christ and Paul are viewed, their teachings were different and a Christianitywhich claims to be built on both has to be incoherent. No certain moral outlook canbe had without accepting that, to be a Christian, the message of Christ must havepriority over interpretations of it like Paul’s, and, in all honesty, Paul should be seennot as an interpreter of Christ’s message but a distorter of it. Even so, Paul was awareof the central points of Christ’s teachings, and while aiming to reject the law andsubstituting faith for works, he ended up nonplussed by his self imposed limitations,and had to prescribe for his hearers alternative rules of appropriate behavior.

Among them was the imitation of Christ, boasting that he himself imitated Christ,and his hearers should too (1 Cor 11:1). The imitation of Christ was a valid Christianteaching, the very reason why any of the life of Christ is remembered at all other thanhis death. Yet the imitation of Christ today is utterly rejected by all but a fewprofessed Christians. Their excuse is that no mortal being could successfully imitateChrist, a god. Paradoxically, those that venerate Paul in particular, reject his plea thatthey imitate Christ, or accept it only in that Christ had faith in his God, and that is asfar as imitation of Christ need go. The imitation of Christ in this diluted sense isanother “do nothing” Christian excuse.

Such Christians claim they have faith, and that is sufficient for salvation. Yet theimitation of Christ requires the Christian to imitate the teaching, deeds and lifestyleof Christ, the central feature of which was love—meaning benevolence, protecting,helping and serving others, and enduring personal slights and criticism in the interestof social harmony rather than seeking revenge. None of the ministry of Jesus had tobe laid out if only his faith was important. The gospels describe the life and works ofJesus leading up to his crucifixion so that they can be a model for his disciples, anexample of his moral principles in his social activity. Important Christian ethicalprinciples are not just taught by Christ but lived by him, so that those who cannotseem to comprehend his teaching can copy his works. Sadly, Christians ignore Christin favor of Paul, who was not a convincing imitation of Christ, not least because of hislack of humility.

Moreover, the imitation of Christ was important for the very reason that his newmorality was hard to comprehend. Love defied the strong passions like anger andhatred that led to conflict, and people used to being able to display anger and hatredfound commands like “love your enemies” and “turn the other cheek” quiteimpossible to fathom. The life of Christ illustrated them, but Christians complain hecannot have meant it—no one can be perfect like God. So, there is no need even to try.There you are. The Christian proves they have no faith, despite their smug conceit.Do they really think God hasn’t noticed their bit of conjuring? Do they honestly thinkthat God, almighty and omniscient as he is, thinks human beings can be perfect whenhe urges them to be, knowing that they are necessarily imperfect human beings? Ifnot, what? He expects people to try!


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J L Houlden, Ethics of the New Testament, 1973

Love, Faith and Omnipotence

The imitation of Christ is their target. No one may ever achieve it, but, in trying theirutmost to do it, the Christian demonstrates their faith. There is no faith where thereare no works. The expression “justification by faith” is Paul’s, but other NewTestament writers have the same idea. Despite the epistle of James, which ought tocount for more than it does, too many New Testament authors play down theindividual’s role in earning salvation by playing on the supremacy of God’s power.Salvation is God’s gift, given through God’s grace, so human “works” are irrelevant.All they need is faith. Or so their excuse goes.

Well, if faith is entirely God’s to give, why should He be any more influenced by thosewho have faith than those who do good deeds? If works are irrelevant to God’s choice,then so is faith. The argument is one of God’s omnipotence. God is believed byChristians to be almighty—He can do just what He likes. But as soon as He isconstrained to do something by obligation, He can no longer be all powerful! Hisobligation to save the faithful has destroyed His right to choose not to.

Even the precursors of the Christians, the Essenes, knew this, and Jesus and hisbrother James were Essenes. They accepted that God could not be constrained, butfelt that sinful men’s nature could, through exercising their will to be good, to try tobe perfect just as God is perfect. They could aspire to salvation. Yes, God could stillreject them, however hard they had tried because God was the sole judge of thematter. But the faith the Essenes had in God was that He was not capricious. Hemade His judgements honestly, based on the effort people had put into their attemptto live perfectly. He would not arbitrarily or whimsically make a perverse decision,but no one could count on being saved, as many modern—Pauline—Christians do.

The reason is simple—no one can presume to know God’s own precise criteria, exceptthat it is not faith alone! We know explicitly that righteousness was an absolutenecessity for entry into God’s kingdom—ie salvation (Matthew 5:6), and that comesdirectly from God Himself in His human form for all genuine Christians. Wherepeople have been sinners, they had to repent first (Matthew 4:17), then had to doeverything Christ commanded (Matthew 28:20). Faith then is the acceptance ofChrist’s words and deeds, and obedience to his command to act on them—to dosomething, namely to love others as you would like to be loved yourself. Faith alonereduces this to nothing—to doing nothing:

The emphasis on God’s indispensable initiative in the work of man’s salvation seemsto reduce the importance of moral striving and of independent moral argument. For acentral motive in the moral struggle—which gives it bite and seriousness—hasapparently been removed. That is the belief that upon success in it, a man’s eternalfuture depends.

Only James’s epistle, directed against Hellenizers like Paul, if not Paul himself, iscrystal clear that works are what matter (James 2:14-26), but Houlden tries toexonerate Paul, and implies that James was wrong about him, but says Paul acceptedthat humans were indeed judged by their works:

Each man’s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be


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1 Cor 3:13-14

revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If thework which any man has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward.

It sounds closer to the moral teaching of Christ but Paul hastily adds in verse 15 thatthe man himself “will be saved, but only as through fire”, whatever that last phrasemeans. It seems that some redactor, perhaps Paul himself, realized the sermon wasgoing beyond the “faith only” teaching and hastily tried to recover by an obfuscation.Paul is meddling with Essenic belief and Christ’s morality that came out of it, and heor the redactor is doing it piecemeal, and therefore not at all coherently.

Pauline Christians like Houlden succeed in reversing the Essenic argument, provingthat, even if Paul did make some allowance for practical morality, his backslidingfollowers did not. Houlden tells his Christian readers that “obedience to God’sfundamental commands is nevertheless futile and harmful, if a man believes that byit he can command God’s approval”. It is the typical “God is an idiot” Christianargument. He slips in the conditional statement, a statement that could not apply toanyone who is a proper Christian, for any such person knows that an almighty Godcannot be commanded by anyone who is not “almighty”. Once this silly conditionalclause is omitted we are left with:

Obedience to God’s fundamental commands is nevertheless futile and harmful.

Plainly, that has to be wrong for anyone who has faith in God. Why would analmighty and all knowing God issue commands to his acolytes when there is no waythey can achieve God’s approval by obeying them? It is nonsense, and satanicnonsense, to any believer. It is saying, “Do not believe God, do not follow Hiscommands, but instead stick to what Paul told you”! Then supposing you decided ondoing this, you find that Paul is telling you that faith alone is the essential forsalvation, and indeed by faith alone you can command God’s approval. Paul says Godhas promised salvation by faith alone, and so most Pauline Christians are convincedthat God has no option but to save them because of their self proclaimed faith.

In fact, the Christian certainly does achieve God’s approval by following Hiscommands—by pursuing the practical moral living that He advocated, naycommanded, to His followers through His earthly lips! God was Christ is thefundamental tenet of Christianity. What the Christian does not get, even by followingevery commandment as well as they possibly can, is certain salvation. Only foolishPauline Christians are so foolish as to believe they can. Only they are bold enough togo around bragging they are saved. Salvation is God’s gift. Only He can decide it. Noone can presume they know what He will decide, for then they are more mighty thanGod. God is doing what they have decided! This again is the “God is an idiot”principle that Paul invented to suit himself. It is certainly wrong because theChristian is supposed to believe what Christ said, for he is the one they believe is God.One of the things Christ said several times is that the Christian must be humble. It isnot humble to tell God that you will be saved—“the first will be last”, according toJesus (Mark 9:35; 10:31; Matthew 19:30; 20:16; Luke 13:30).

How then can Pauline Christians expect to have God’s favor and grace when theyboast that they are saved simply because they announce they are Christians. They aremeant to know that salvation depends ultimately on God’s grace, and that cannot be


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Romans 3:31

assumed whatever they do. So all of those who assume it, believing their lying pastorsare as likely to be lost as saved because they have not done the basics properly. Theyclaim to have faith, but only works can demonstrate it, and boasting is not a sign ofhumility.

Houlden, typically satanic, says Paulinism takes the “all too common self concern outof the moral struggle”. Yet, if morals are important at all, self concern is essential.People have to be concerned that they are being morally correct. That is the point!Paulinism takes all concern about moral struggle from the hope for salvation becausePaul offers it as the fool’s reward for doing nothing. Christ required works. “Works”means doing what is right. Doing what is right is what makes one righteous, andrighteousness is what saves! By adopting the wonderfully easy “do nothing” approachto salvation, the quack evangelist, Paul, and all his quack successors, got easyconverts and riches off the back of it. Evangelists have been doing it ever since, andare often most successful in periods of anxiety.

People in the Roman world were chafed at the state of the world then, and have beenoften since, but Christianity is a poor ointment for it. Following the way of Christ isnot easy, so, as an ointment for angst, it is expensive. The way to God, all Christiansshould know because Christ himself taught it, is much harder then the way to hell. Sowhy would anyone imagine that an easy path, like Paul’s, is anything but a path tohell?

The message of Christ is all the more important in hard times. It remains love others,help them, and be kind to each other—a practical, simple, and eternal morality, allthe more important in hard times, difficult, yes, but Jesus did not try to hide it, asPaul did. It means making an effort, and that is what merits the reward. WhatChristians count as salvation is found in the life and good works they do towardsother people in our human societies.

If only otherworldly things mattered, love itself would be pointless. That is perhapswhy so few Christians actually love others, other than close relatives and somefriends. Christ substituted the general principle of love of others for the whole of theJewish law. It was its fulfilment, and Paul shows he knew something of Christ’steaching of love when he writes:

Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means. On the contrary, we upholdthe law.

In leading up to this Paul ties himself, and Christian commentators, in knots. He saysthere is no distinction between faith in Jesus and the law, then proceeds to findone—faith in Jesus is superior because it expiates or propitiates sin! God does it eventhough human beings are sinners because He is just! He always wanted to forgivehumans their sins, but He couldn’t do it! He could only be forbearing, but now Hecould do what he always wanted to do, and could make anyone righteous, eventhough they had consistently sinned and deserved no forgiveness, merely throughtheir faith in Jesus. It is, Paul says, all that a monotheistic God can do, and it isentirely in line with the Jewish law.


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Romans 3:28

“Paulianity” as a Mystery Religion

Paul plainly sets himself up as a new god with his novel dying and rising mysteryreligion—his new take on Attis. The whole argument simply to abolish good works asa criterion of God’s favorable judgement, and to substitute empty faith:

We hold a man is justified by faith apart from works of the law.

But again, how can anyone have faith in Jesus as God incarnate and ignore what theincarnated God said during his incarnation, believing instead an ordinary man whosaid something not only different but contradictory? Faith alone is impossible, acontradiction—it must necessitate faith in what Jesus taught above what Paul taught,and Jesus taught good deeds were necessary, for at Judgement Day God wouldseparate the sheep from the goats. How can He do that when they are all sheep,because He has forgiven every sinner however wicked their sins?

All of the good qualities cited as desirable by Jesus, such as the list of beatitudes inMatthew 5, are earthly qualities. Those who have them, those who are kind, peaceful,lawful, tolerant, satisfied with little, merciful, and so on, are ideal partners in theideal community—on earth! That would be the community of the future—theChristian community. So, these qualities are this worldly, not other worldly. Thesecharacteristics stem from our social instincts, instincts necessary in a stable andharmonious society, one such that God would want to see.

If God was interested only in the other world, then what was His overwhelming needto create this one? If Jesus was interested only in the other world then why did hepreach as he did that people should have all these this worldly qualities? Even thoseprepared to give a cup of water to Christians would be rewarded (Mark 9:41), so howcan more significant good deeds be without reward in the Pauline fabrication? Theaim is utterly practical, utterly of this world. Are there cups of water in heaven?Loving others is a question of will. We don’t have to do it, and increasingly peoplehave not been, especially in the higher echelons of society.

Heaven may be a place where everybody loves everyone else, and God, beingalmighty, could instantly sift the wheat and the chaff and then destroy the world withthe chaff in it, leaving everyone with loving souls in heaven. It would have the benefitof instantly eliminating the farce of faith. But God is an idiot, as all Pauline Christiansassume. God as Jesus advocated love and the practical qualities that he blessed. Iffaith is all that matters to God, then why love, and why preach beatitudes? If love isthe essential glue between people that makes a successful society, the point ofChristian morality is social not spiritual, unless “spiritual” is another word forbeneficial or good.

It all seems obvious, but Paul was intent on mystifying Christ’s simple message. Forhim the virtues of this world, socially benevolent virtues, were downgraded below themystical thinking that links Paul with the dying and rising gods, and the Gnostics.Paul’s writings, profound and high minded as Christians regard them, are amishmash. Few of them are single intact letters, indeed it is unlikely they were lettersdespite their name and the form they take. Just as Paul may be a generic Hellenisticmissionary compounded of several of them with views at odds with the Jerusalem


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1 Cor 13:4-8; 13:13-14:1

Church, his letters are made up of extracts and fragments of a mixture of sources,some closer to Christ and James than others.

If Paul was one man, he was incoherent, if several, then different points of view arebeing attributed falsely to one man. Yet, it adds to the mystique of the biblical Paulbecause the work attributed to him is incoherent, and when writings are hard tounderstand, they are not infrequently considered deep. Anyway, while the elevationof faith as a magical mystical medicine for sin is uppermost in Paul’s varied works, asis evident from the Pauline Christianity that came to dominate the western world,there are significant passages that fit uncomfortably with it, and sound closer to theChristianity of Christ. In 1 Corinthians 13:1-14:1, Paul waxes lyrical about love inpreparation for extolling the insanity of speaking in tongues:

Love is patient and kind, love is not envious, love is not vain or boastful, it is not rude,it has no hidden agenda, it is not resentful or wicked in intent, does not rejoice inunrighteousness, but rejoices in righteousness and truth. Love bears all things,believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends… So faith,hope, and love abide, these three things, but the greatest of these is love. Make ityour aim to love…

It is as if a true follower of Christ had interpolated this passage, cleverly melding itinto a nonsensical Pauline passage about “prophecy” and speaking in tongues torestore love to the principle virtue in spite of Paul! Similarly, in Philippians 2:1-11, ifPaul is the author, he extols humility, just as Christ did. Paul rarely seemed humble.He was mostly full of himself, boastful, and in your face, whereas humility wasJesus’s natural garment, at least in the three synoptic gospels, which are earlier andlikely to be more authentic. Today, Christians as a whole, especially in the USA,model themselves on Paul—they are anything but humble. They are bombastic, smugand boastful in their utter ignorance, with few exceptions.

Paul advocated the magic salve of a mystery religion, and Christians who follow himlove it, but it does not cure anything, and it does not entitle them to use the nameChristian. They are Paulians not Christians, and their religion is Paulianity notChristianity. The have faith but no love, except of themselves, and, as we saw, evenPaul, nominally at least, admitted love was the greater. If Paul has not been confusedby later cutting and pasting, he is confused and incoherent in his own right. Eventhough the words of Christ were recorded a generation or more after his crucifixion,his argument is largely consistent, and the few apparent contradictions are obviousinterpolations by the bishops of the gentile church, in which he either denies Judaismor pronounces his aim of setting up a new religion, both of which do not fit in with hisbelief that the world was about to end. The clergy are aware of these interpolations,having been taught them at seminary by biblical scholars, but they are not oftenwilling to pass on the information to their congregations for fear of losing them. Theywant to keep their platters full, so they do not want to startle the sheep.

The End of Time

God is, for any Christian, real or so-called, Christ, and Christ not Paul speaks with theauthority of God. Once a Christian is wise enough to recognize at least the obviousadditions, they can get a good idea of Christ’s practical, this worldly morality—the


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way that Christians were intended to imitate Christ, and as he taught, try to be perfectlike God. Yet how many Christians do this? They do the opposite with their excusethat it is an impossible task to be perfect like God. The Christian never has anytrouble in contradicting the inerrant bible and trumping God when they want to.Only an idiot God could imagine human beings so perfect, He cannot have meant it,so they can forget it. Surely, for any Godfearing Christian, God is the perfect judge.He can tell those who are seriously trying to be perfect as He directed from those whomake feeble and demeaning excuses for not trying, while still expecting the supremebeing they are glibly insulting to save them.

Jesus was expecting the End. He believed the archangel Michael and his host ofangels would burst from the Mount of Olives on the night of the vigil in the Garden ofGethsemane. He taught repentance—sincerely confessing and regretting past sins,and determining thereafter to remain free of sin until kingdom come. Instead ofsinning, they were to love others, to treat them with kindness and mercy, to care forthem and help them in difficulties. What is the point of all that if Paul’s was thecorrect Christian teaching?

Jesus was wrong about the angelic host. It never came, and Jesus resigned himself todie as a false prophet as Deuteronomy prescribed, perhaps expecting his armedfollowers to behead him. Instead he was arrested and crucified, probably havinginstead arranged, in the event of the Heavenly Armies failing to arrive, for Judas toshow the guards where and who he was. Christians always know God’s plan, or whatthey are told by others equally ignorant, is God’s plan. If there is any such thing,Jesus believed it was to be the Judgement Day, that very day he was in the Garden ofGethsemane.

The End has still not come 2000 years later, but, if God’s plan is what the incarnationof God taught, it was that Christians should aim to be Christs, moral leadersspreading the practical morality of love, as long as the End has not come. Only thatcould have been God’s real plan. An almighty being could have ended the world thereand then in the supernatural defeat of evil, as Jesus expected. He did not do it. WhatHe did was to appear on earth and say with absolute clarity, in His own words, whatgood people, Christians, were to do. They did not do it! His plan was foiled. It failedas soon as Paul got to the Hellenized Jews and gentiles, enamored of easternmysteries, with his do-nothing message of faith instead of Christ’s message of love. Sofar few people have noticed the substitution.

Love is in fact essential among humans who want to live in harmony. Love is a vitalfeature of society—we live together precisely so that we can give and receive help,protection and care from other people. Love is not a short term measure to securerighteousness before Judgement Day, it is how we live together at all.

Christianity as a mass movement never followed the ethics of Christ, even though hewas considered to have been the only God of the universe materialized in a humanform. The bible shows that Paul, never one of the Twelve, took up the running,denigrated the original apostles, changed the morality of Christians from that of theJerusalem Church—led by James who wrote against Paul’s unilateral changes—andthereby found an easy route into the Hellenistic world of Rome. Paul, we are toldhailed from Tarsus in Asia Minor, a place where the dying and rising god, Attis, waspopularly revered—under the name Sandan, who was likened to Herakles, according


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to Dio Chrysostom. Paul, at the crossing of the Jewish and Hellenistic cultures sawChrist as Attis. While some of the central messages of Christ were known amongsome Hellenized Jews, Paul could not completely ignore them in building his newcult, but he was able to change the emphasis from the original message of love andfrugality to the confidence trick of faith by normally putting love lower down hishierarchy of virtues than faith.

The Roman Milieu

Once Christianity had become an item in the Roman world, it was subject to all thetraditions and habits within it. Stoicism was popular among educated people, and, asthe Christian bishops aspired to greater respectability, aspired to attract other thanslaves and the underclasses, having abandoned love as little more than a Christianidiosyncrasy symbolized as a somewhat debauched feast, they turned to stoical valuesfor their morality. Stoicism was “an ethic of human brotherhood and self fulfilment”,and so was caring and tolerant. It was not a religion per se but a world outlook or apractical philosophy of life—much as Jesus had taught in his practical morality—andwas indifferent to religions, although it tolerated them while offering practical waysof withstanding the slings and arrows of fortune—the vicissitudes of life.

Christianity, like Judaism, because of its intolerance, and because Romans knew ofits Jewish and anti-Roman roots, was unpopular among patriotic Romans. Thisunpopularity has been mythologized into continuous persecution, though, Christianswere only persecuted occasionally by emperors who saw the threat it offered toRoman civic traditions—which Christians abhorred—and so to Rome itself. Thespread of Christianity is a warning that intolerance ultimately trumps toleration.Romans were broadly tolerant of religions, Christians were not. Some Romans sawthe danger but attempts to purge the danger were too late and ineffective. Today inthe USA, Christians so-called have the same fears of Moslem intolerance. So theyknow how the patriotic Roman felt about the growth of their own religion in the firstthree centuries.

Educated Romans found religious intolerance difficult, and despite popular patrioticintolerance of Christianity’s hatred of Roman civic institutions, it was able to spreadin the legal milieu of the magistrates courts, a milieu the gospels themselves illustratein their (false) depiction of Pontius Pilate as himself tolerant of Christ. Toleration wasnot the issue in this case, nor was it possible. Though Jesus is popularly depicted asan innocent holy teacher, the Romans obviously thought otherwise. He had beenacclaimed a king, and had accepted the acclamation. That is why he was labeled onthe cross as “The king of the Jews”. Pilate could not be tolerant of a rival to Caesarwithout himself seeming a traitor. But in the time of the “persecutions”, Romanmagistrates tried their utmost to prevent ecstatic and unstable Christians fromcommitting themselves to martyrdom. Even though they were not sympathetic to theover enthusiasm of those appearing before them, the magistrates were reluctant to letthem be martyrs.

Meanwhile, Christianity was melding slowly and subtly with Roman culture. Convertscould not instantly lose their habits of a lifetime, so the Christian message was recastin local idioms, and eventually the whole bible appeared in Latin. Popular socialhabits of the time came to be considered Christian—clerics still dress in late Roman


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gear. Scholars have quite properly spoken not of the conversion of Rome toChristianity, but of the conversion of Christianity to Rome. Later that became anissue for Protestants who accused Catholics of not being Christians, yet theProtestants had only one model of Christianity before them, the Catholic religion,from which they had split, so they retained much of the accumulated ways ofCatholicism, objecting mainly to grandeur in church decoration, the Latin bible, andthe power of the Divines of the Catholic Church.

Thus, the original architect of the Antichristian Church, Paul, Protestants reveredeven more than the Catholics did. They did not abandon faith for love as they shouldhave, but made even more of faith, and once the bible had been translated into thevernacular, they idolized it too. The conversion of Christianity was completed by Pauland the bishops accepting the status quo, the emperor, civic religion, unbelievablewealth, slavery, the subordination of women, and the Roman state as a military state.Christianity had been converted.

In practical terms, Jesus Christ was a rebel, and that is why many Romans could notaccept Christianity in its first few hundred years. Whether the reader of the gospelssees a rival to Caesar or a religious leader, Christ’s doctrines were revolutionary andoutstandingly moral. His idea of substituting the complexities of the law of Moseswith the simple criterion of love was both natural and rebellious, and still remains so.Love is a natural human instinct which ought to be properly cultivated, but humansociety, not least Jewish society, had replaced love with law, replaced a naturalinstinct with social coercion. Social and evolutionary biology show both arenecessary, but with the law as a reminder to free riders that no one can takeadvantage of natural kindness.

Paul and “Paulianity”

Some people have seen Paul not as an apostle of Christ, but a man setting himself upas a prophet and to found a new religion. He began his career persecuting the firstfollowers of Christ, according to Acts of the Apostles, and was involved in the murderof Stephen. Allegedly he had a remarkable conversion to the Christianity he had beenharassing, but then spent his career preaching a different gospel from Christ’s, and itis his gospel that most Christians now believe. Christ had an admirably simple, easyto understand and applicable message of love, humility and frugality, and Paulechoes it in part because too many of his contemporaries, Hellenized Jews, had agood idea of what Christ taught, especially as they would have recognized him as anEssene.

Yet Paul emphasized quite different things, beginning by mystifying the practicalprinciples. He substituted faith for love and virtue, then had them reappear asmysterious symptoms of faith and “the spirit”, not something to be done explicitlybecause they were what pleased God. Nowhere does Paul use Christ’s argument thatGod is in everyone just as He was in Christ himself as a reason for people to loveothers, be kind and to do no harm. Rather he mystifies it by reversing it to we are allin God, something which Christ said required sincere repentance and a sinless lifethereafter!

Paul does sometimes argue that Christians should imitate Christ, and he sometimes


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give moral examples that spring from Christ’s precepts without saying so, orexplaining them as examples of one of Christ’s principles. Love, frugality andhumility, practised communally necessitate an economic equality, which the apostlesin Acts exemplify, and so too did the Essenes, an important point of contact. Pauladvocates equality of wealth in his pleas for gifts, ostensibly for the saints inJerusalem, but from which he took his due like any publican. Equality for otherseventually made Paul a rich man. What had been considered proper because it wasdone by Christ, under Paul became the duties of those who were members of achurch, a much feebler motive. The wish to imitate Christ is a more positive andpersonal motive than to have imposed duties as a church member. Christ, as thefount and origin of the Church, must be a more incisive motivation than theinstitution that sprang from his teaching.

Paul made apparent allusions to the teaching of Jesus without the clarity of theoriginal. So some scholars deny that Paul had ever known Christ’s message at firsthand, so built up his own around what little he did know of it. Most Christians willnot hear that Paul taught anything different from Jesus, but rather was appointed byGod as the apostle to the gentiles, to make Christ’s message clear to the world. Noneof them can bear to imagine he could have been Satan’s apostle appointed to negateGod’s moral activities, just as Ahriman always negated the intentions of Ahuramazdain Zoroastrianism. The Christian Ahriman is Satan, the Devil.

Paul makes Christ’s death a saving mystery, illogical and fantastic, but the core of his“faith”, a compulsory belief for those who fretted about life after death. Christ—following the original Persian tradition that every one of us has a personal battle towin if the cosmic war is to end in victory—taught the simple secret of human morality—love. Paul confused it. When something is crystal clear, expressed in a single word,elaborate descriptions and explanations ought not to be needed. To do so is confusingbecause it is heading back whither the need for the single word came—the confusionof the law of Moses which was repeatedly elaborated until only scholars couldcomprehend it. Paul abolishes the law without emphasizing the one wordreplacement for it. Consequently, he has to keep reiterating blocks of legal obligationsand rules of conduct for Christians to learn (Col 3:5-4:1, and elsewhere, if not at suchlength).

It cannot be repeated often enough, to counter Paul’s obfuscation, that love is not anempty symbol of an unattainable goal, or one only attainable after death. If Christianstruly believe Christ is God, they must hear and do what he taught and did, acceptingthat God’s commands are not optional. Imagine that human nature could be nothingbut loving and caring. Society would be perfect. That is the point and the purpose ofChrist’s teaching, the purpose of love. It solved the problems of society—selfishness.Paul ruins it. He reinstates selfishness as personal salvation through faith. Lovebecomes merely a symptom of good faith, and faith requires no effort because it isreadily available to anyone who agrees with the magical claim that the crucifixion ofChrist absolved everyone from sin. Hitler’s insane ambition led to the death of 55million people, but he was a faithful Christian—he had faith “in the cross”, as Paulwould put it, so he was as sinless as a new born babe. Hitler was a lifelong Catholicbaptized “into Christ”, as another Pauline magical formula would have it, equatingwith complete forgiveness through “a vital union with Christ”—that is, for nothingmore than being a Christian.


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Paul tortuously (Romans 4:1-8) invokes the faith of Abraham and the Psalms ofDavid to prove that faith removes the need for works, contrary to everything thatChrist said. It is phony and hogwash. Psalms 32, the start of which Paul cites(Romans 4:7-8) is explicitly referring to those who repent of their sins and askforgiveness, as the rest of the psalm makes clear. Trust or faith in God is required, butit is not faith that God is an idiot! It is faith that He is willing to forgive genuinerepentance. No repentance is sincere or genuine when the next day the penitent hasto repent again! Sincere repentance is marked by a determination not to sin again,and any such sin proves it was not sincere. Christ was so concerned that his hearersdid not take this seriously that he told them it was better to pluck out an eye ratherthan allow it to lead its owner into sin again, having repented. Yet today, millions ofChristians so-called betray their false Pauline beliefs by boasting on the internet thatthey often have to repent and be forgiven, and Catholics have made an institution ofit in the confession.

Criteria of Judgement

Repentance is remorse, regret for wrongdoing, compunction, and an appreciation ofthe misery caused to others. If that is sincere, it is final, and life thereafter isdedicated to the love and service of others, not teasing, taunting, tricking, robbingand exploiting them. Continual repentance and forgiveness is a meaningless routinethat assumes the idiot God and serves only the priests or pastors of one’s chosenchurch. It is not loving others, but loving yourself. Repentance has to be sincere. Youhave to be genuinely sorry to mean it. Jesus believed the day of Judgement was notfar off, that it could arrive at any time, like a thief in the night appearing withoutwarning, so, unless repentance was accompanied by a determination to be righteousfrom then on, the least sin could exclude the sinner from the kingdom of God.

In fact, the kingdom was yet far off, and in less fraught times people had time toamend for their minor or inadvertent sins by doing good to counterbalance them.Judgement, according to Revelation 20:12, and the older Zoroastrian religion of thePersians, depended upon a balance sheet of good and bad deeds in each person’sBook of Life—proof again from the New Testament that faith alone is nonsense inChristian belief. Repentance, Christians should believe from Jesus and John theBaptist, discounted one’s previous sins, as long as they did not begin again to fill theirBook of Life with new ones. Jesus was effectively saying you have one chance ofrepentance, but no more. If you are not sincere and sin again, then you have had it.

Of course, no one is privy to God’s detailed criteria of Judgement, but the balance ofone’s good and bad deeds has to be favorable, either by living a good life or byrepenting of one’s bad deeds and thereafter leading a good life. The believer thereforeought to be cautious. If they really fear hell fire, they ought not to believe Paul’sblandishment that faith is sufficient to absolve them of all sin, however gross. Jesusemphatically did not teach it. He taught that the gate to hell was wide. It was the gateto heaven that was narrow. How does that tie in with the Paul’s easy path throughfaith?

Paul was using Christ, and so could not ignore what people had heard of him and histeaching from other sources. Paul could not just ignore Christ’s lesson of love, so hedid not but subverted it with the supposedly more important virtue of faith. The


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virtues urged by Christ as a matter of will and regard for other people, Paul reducedto mere symptoms of faith, magically imbued by it. So modern Pauline Christians areconcerned only with their faith, ignoring that, even on Paul’s criterion, it necessitatedlove of others, and additional virtues like humility, generosity and frugality. It followsthat the absence of any of these virtues signifies the absence of faith! Paulians preferto believe that baptism “into Christ”, and the consequent membership of “Christ’sbody”, the Church, spiritually, magically or miraculously made them moral enoughfor admission to God’s kingdom. There is nothing hard in that! Christ had made itplain, though, that it was hard. Yet Paul admits that the supposed magic of faith wasinsufficient—a personal effort of will was necessary too. In Galatians 5:25, themagical influence of the spirit was evidently failing. Paul urged:

If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit.

So, his converts were unable to rely on faith alone to “walk by the Spirit”—they had tobe urged by Paul to make an effort to do it. Doing good equates with “works”!Similarly faith alone is insufficient in Colossians 3:5-6, where Christians have to “putto death what is earthly in them”, for “the wrath of God is coming upon the sons ofdisobedience”. Paul then goes on to list the vices that Christians had to “put away”,among them covetousness, malice, and lying, while “putting on” as God’s chosen onescompassion, kindness, meekness, forgiveness and, “above all these love which bindseverything together in perfect harmony”.

Christ patiently taught that love was the one single action to live by, because itsubsumes all the other virtues and eliminates the vices. Love, however, in the face ofthe many people, many of them Christians, who are intolerant, ill mannered, greedy,obnoxious and self-serving requires continuous effort. Christian love has served itspurpose only when it is habitual in everybody. Until then Christians were meant toshow the way by serving others with kindness and mercy. It does not come by anyeffort of God, by miracles or magic, but by the hard work of being a Christ! Thetheology of Christ, as opposed to that of Christianity, was that this effort wasnecessary to earn God’s reward, even if it was not sufficient—God having the finalsay. The reward was always in the gift of God, but Jesus taught clearly that failure todo good meant elimination from any further consideration.

It is true that, unlike fundamentalists, we allow for failures of transcription,transmission and translation whenever we consider the gospels accounts of Jesus andhis teaching, or the letters which purport to be from the hand of Paul. But knowingthe Pauline distortion of the church as it turned out, and comparing it with thenarrative of Jesus, knowing now, with reasonable certainty, his historicalcircumstances, it is easier to see passages purportedly concerning Jesus that must beinterpolated or gravely distorted. Many of the supposed miracles are parablesmisunderstood or deliberately changed. Paul has to contend primarily with himself.He is too consistently inconsistent for it to make sense as deliberate redacting.

An important reason for his inconsistency is that he could not decide what he wasdoing—telling people how to be saved, or telling people how to behave as citizens ofthe societies in which they lived. For Christ, the two were one. He expected theapocalypse soon, and that was what was important personally and socially. Paulfound that too demanding. He wanted to build up a following by teaching something


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Galatians 6:2

similar to that which Christ had taught, but he found that his converts wereabandoning normal life because the End was nigh, and that did not suit him. Likemodern pastors, he needed the donations, so did not want a load of people entirelyliving on hand outs of bread, having given up working. So, despite the forthcomingEnd, his followers had to remain good Romans. Moreover, faith was a lot easier to getpeople committed to whereas love was another matter.

Sexuality

Paul’s main concern always was sexual. He was more fanatically concerned thatChristians should forgo sex than any other sin they might commit. It is the reasonChristianity has been obsessed with sex, particularly with avoiding it. Christ wasmuch more easy going. If people married then they were to cleave together as one,and divorce was adultery, but for some men, those who could receive it, chastity andcelibacy were the ideal (Matthew 19:11-12). The source of this is plainly Essene.

Leading Essenes, those who could receive it, were chaste and celibate, but besidesthese were married Essenes. If the evidence is read correctly, Paul tried to become anEssene, serving as a novice for three years, but failing to be accepted as an initiate.Nevertheless the requirement of chastity seems to have impressed him so much thathe took it as preferable for his own converts. From the Essene writings, the objectiveof it was to be as close to the angels as possible, angels not being sexual creatures.Immortality excludes any need for sex, or therefore, sexual organs, and so thesepeople chose to be chaste (“make themselves eunuchs”) “for the kingdom of heaven”(Mt 19:12). It adds to the evidence that Christ was an Essene. The Galli, the priests ofMagna Mater, actually castrated themselves, as did the Christian intellectual, Origen,so it is not impossible that Christ and the leading Essenes did too.

In any event, Christians followed Paul in preferring chastity, but often water downthe need for it. J Hurd (The Origin of 1 Corinthians, 1965) argued that Paul retreatedfrom a strict position to much more conventionally acceptable ones on several issues,including marriage, all part of making his message more user friendly.1 Thessalonians 4:7 shows that Paul considered sex unclean, perhaps his reason forpreferring chastity. Moreover, lust might interfere with the mutual love of thebrethren (1 Thessalonians 4:9). Remember too that despite his appellation, “Apostleto the Gentiles”, Paul concerned himself initially with Hellenized diaspora Jews andGodfearers. Much of his argument is directed against the strictness of the law, whichwas irrelevant to gentiles, except those few who followed the Noachidelaw—Godfearers. Christ wanted to fulfil the law through love of others, but Paulwanted to abolish it in favor of faith. Paul knows that Christ had not abolished thelaw, writing:

Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.

Love, more explicitly, lovingkindness, is precisely “bearing one another’s burdens”—works again! Obedience to law is necessary for social harmony, but, for Christ, lovedoes it. Paul wanted freedom from the Mosaic law, but then has to give lists of thingsto do and not to do, confusing the utter simplicity of Christ’s law. It is hardlysurprising that Paul’s converts in Corinth, rich in faith as they no doubt were, had


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Colossians 3:4

1 Cor 13:13

Rom 13:8

Gal 5:13-14

interpreted the Pauline law as “all things are lawful to me” as a Christian, and wereacting with complete immorality, doubtless much of it sexual.

Paul did not deny the Corinthian Christians’ slogan, merely saying, “not all things arehelpful”, and “I will not be enslaved by anything”, then belatedly reminded them(1 Corinthians 10:24) that Christians were meant to seek the good of their neighborsnot their own. At 1 Corinthians 11:1, he tells them to imitate him—Paul—to take himas their model just as he imitates Christ. Christ would have cut through all thisconfusion with his own succinct law—love others as if they might be God Himselfincarnate—as if any one of them were Christ. Perhaps, he would have reminded themtoo that repentance for their sins followed by a sinless life until the End or their owndeath was necessary if not sufficient for salvation. Paul taught that they were alreadysaved, so that:

When Christ who is our own life appears, then you will appear with him in glory.

They will? Then they must have sincerely repented and remained sinless thereafter.Why then does Paul have to urge these converts to “put away” that litany of vices, andinstead “put on” that litany of virtues (Colossians 3:5-15)? Is it any wonder thatilliterate and semi literate people today are confused and themselves remain anythingbut ideal humans while boasting their Christianity and their presumed salvation? ForPaul, professing Christianity saved them. To profess Christianity is to have faith! Paulcould not deny that “all things are lawful” because it was the logic of his “faith alone”dogma.

Love the Greatest Virtue

Of the list of virtues Paul urged his converts to adopt, even though they were free ofthe law, love was prime!

Now faith, hope, and love, these three things remain; but the greatest of these islove.

Owe no man any thing, but to love one another, for he that loveth another hathfulfilled the law.

For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty, only use not liberty for an occasion tothe flesh, but by love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, evenin this—Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

So, Paul is at this point teaching a confused form of Christ’s morality. Here he sayslove is prime yet he teaches in general that faith is prime. Love saves for Christ, butfaith saves for Paul. Which of these requires the least change of lifestyle and the leasteffort, for that one will succeed the more easily given that people want to live whenthey are dead? It was not Christ’s morality. Paul won over the gentile church with hiseasy option. Jewish Christians gave up their Judaism to become gentiles or theyretained their Judaism and left the gentile church which otherwise began to fillquickly with gentiles whom other religions would not accept, including many women.


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Gal 5:6

In Galatians 5:6, Paul explicitly says faith works through love for everyone, Jew orgentile!

For in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision, butfaith which worketh by love.

He is accepting the argument presented by James in his single epistle in which hedefends works against faith. Faith alone is dead, James wrote. Faith requires works oflove, so it is indeed love which is the essence of salvation for the Christian, yetmodern Christians, especially those Protestants influenced by Luther whodisregarded the epistle of James, persist in exalting faith as the mystical key tosalvation, instead of love, the practical key taught by Christ. Faith necessarily givesrise to love, these preachers hold, against all the evidence before their eyes. Love wasJesus’s cure for the dissension in society, yet modern societies are riven bydissension, greed, anxiety, and suspicion.

Love is reciprocal. It is meant to be returned, and more than 80 percent of us areready to return it. So love is like magnetism, it transmits to others until we all line upin social harmony, and in Christian belief, those who try to do it are the ones who arerewarded. That small fraction of less than 20 percent—psychological studies show itexists—are more ready to do what their peers are doing, so when their peers are beingmutually helpful and are not trying to cheat others, they will incline that way, butwhen they see others getting away with greed and trickery, they do the same. Ofcourse, when they persist in being selfish and unloving towards others, then they aregiving up their chance of Christian salvation. The punishment of hell fire is aimed atpersuading these backsliders to come into the fold, as Christ would put it. Then, likethe Lost Sheep and the Prodigal Son, they will be forgiven and will have the samereward as everyone else—eternal life.

Faith then is trust that God will reward those who love others, and punish those whodo not. Whoever gets the reward and the punishment is entirely up to God—they arein His gift, according to Christian belief, but the qualifying criteria have been clearlylaid out by Christ. Faith is confidence that God will judge fairly! It does not equatewith confidence that anyone is automatically saved. Good deeds are necessary forthat.

Meanwhile social disapproval may be used to put pressure upon those who not onlyrefuse to care for others but take pleasure in harming them, providing that suchdisapproval does not extend to persecution of whole sections of society. That wouldnot be love. Some few might be incapable of anything but self love, but that is anillness for diagnosis. Some few might prefer a life of crime, and again, if their habitsare persistent then separation from society might be necessary for society’sprotection. But essentially as social human beings the large majority of us have asocial instinct which makes love a dominant trait of behavior in us. So care is neededin making an example of those who seem not to show it.

Christ’s moral code urges us not to judge others, lest we be judged ourselves, and thereason is plain, it is all too easy for us to judge people wrongly, and it is even easierfor us to get caught up in a mass hysteria against one or a group of our fellowhumans. Today, it is used by the media to sell newspapers, and to influence people to


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take political stands based on hatred. We are not to do it, according to Christ, andwhen society has to do it to protect itself, it needs to take care to have the properevidence. That is “Due Process”.

Paul cannot make up his mind whether he is instructing his converts in a new ethicbased on love rather than law, or whether they should still follow the conventionalrules and manners he gave them. He himself has no faith that love of others issufficient, and continues to itemize virtues, not distinctly Christian ones, like theaforementioned list at Colossians 3:18-4:6. He veers between the two extremes in hisinconsistent way, making some scholars doubt that all the letters attributed to Paulare actually his, and even that the letters themselves are not from a single author butare compilations of several early Christian authors by a later redactor. UltimatelyPaul sold Christianity not as a moral system but as an eastern mystery.

The new believers took their initiation ceremony as a rebirth into a new life, but thenotion of being “born again” is unlikely to have originated in Christianity. The newlife ideally was a moral life, but there was little pressure other than exhortation tomake it so. Christ made love of others central to the idea of salvation. God offered itas a reward for love, but Paul negated it, while seeming to preach what Christ hadsaid. Paul’s new life was one in which the sinner was reconciled with God, but noreconciliation was possible while the sinner continued to sin, and both Christ andJohn the Baptist were unequivocal about it. Modern Christians seem to think heavenis full of sinners, blurred by the smoke and mirrors of faith to look like saints. Theperfect place is full of sham perfect souls!

Even in his attitude to the Mosaic law, Paul considers it at core not related tobehavior or morality. The Jewish law, he thinks was prescribed by God to delineatehow Jews should relate to Him. The moral prescriptions of the law are onlysecondary. It is akin to his preference of faith—a relationship with God—over worksof lovingkindness. Yet, if Paul is right, God still prescribed moral behavior as themeasure of relatedness with Him. That is no minor point. By obeying the law, Jewsbehaved according to God’s will, they behaved in the way He prescribed—morally—sothat they could relate properly with the supremely moral being! Jesus substitutedlove of others as the most succinct expression of the law, thus fulfilling it, and therebyproving in acts of love that humanity respected God’s will.

These are the plain and simple interpretations of God’s intentions given theChristian’s acceptance that the bible expresses God’s will. Paul and his successorsreject them. God, according to the Torah, gave the law to the Jews via Moses, butPaul thought it was flawed. Its moral purpose, Paul thought, detracted from its truepurpose of building a relationship between humanity and God. God was wrong tomake morality the center of His relationship with mankind. Paul is arrogant enoughto correct God! Paul did not want mere morality to have that role. So, he substitutedfaith. Morals only matter through faith, according to Paul, completely missing, if thatis so, that God had set moral measures for faith! Jesus understood it thus, and so toodid James, yet Paul prevailed. The easy Antichristian beliefs triumphed to ruleChristianity, as it is erroneously called.

For all that Paul disdains the law as a valid bridge to God, we saw that henevertheless lists moral virtues that Christians should adopt, but he has no adequategeneral principle for selecting which Old Testament commandments remained valid


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and which did not. It seems arbitrary, and has left a terrible legacy. ModernAntichristians—most modern Christians—select whatever Old Testament ordinancesthat suit their own prejudices, while ignoring adjacent commandments that do notsuit their own sins. More particularly, they ignore Christ’s own law which eliminatesthe old Mosaic law by fulfilling it! Anyone who has read the gospels just appliesChrist’s law of lovingkindness to determine what is right and what is wrong. Paulconfuses this with his own confusion compounded by his arrogance. The truth is thatPaul effectively abrogated the law in favor of faith, whereas Jesus believed hismorality of love fulfilled it.

-oOo-


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New Testament and Christian Ethics: Christ’s Morality or Paul’s?

Documents

Transcript of New Testament and Christian Ethics: Christ’s Morality or Paul’s?