On the Old Wheeze That “Paul Invented Christianity”

Periodically, somebody revives the old chestnut that Jesus did not found a Church, has nothing to do with Christianity, and that Paul was the real culprit in inventing the whole thing. Here, for instance, is Jim Palmer’s version of the argument:

“Modern Christianity mostly revolves around the teachings of Saint Paul, and not Jesus. The central creeds of Institutional Christianity contain little or no teachings of Jesus. Christianity is not the fault of Jesus.

Jesus and Paul would have not gotten along well, and Jesus would have been dismayed by many of the concepts that Paul devised. No other individual shaped the Jesus story that morphed into orthodox Christianity more than Paul. Western Christianity is Pauline. Paul wrote his letters before the gospels were written, and likely influenced the synoptic gospel writers. Jesus would have been dumbfounded by the mythology and theology that got attached to his name.

One thing Paul did very successfully, and in my view very unfortunately, was lock in the idea of atonement and bloodshed as salvific. The Jewish sacrifice of the lamb became the model for the Roman execution of Jesus who became the “lamb of God,” who died to take the rap for the sins of all humankind. The earliest followers of Jesus did not go about making crucifixes. The first carved cross doesn’t appear until the 7th century. In essence, Paul the prime architect of Christian doctrine, turned Christianity into Cross-tianity.

I see great value and benefit to the biblical stories about the life and teachings of Jesus and the emergence and evolution of Christianity. However, in my view, it cannot be properly understood and appreciated without taking into account the factors that influenced and shaped it.

Paul’s letters in the New Testament were basically responses to questions and concerns that the earliest Christian communities posed to him, trying to sort out their beliefs and practices. You might ask, “Who died and made Paul pope?” Doesn’t matter, Paul found himself in the regrettable situation of being the expert on how to do Christianity. Keep in mind, Paul did not do this in a vacuum. He had been influenced and conditioned by his own previous religious training, and would have drawn upon these and other factors as the raw materials from which to devise his theology. All things considered, I don’t think any of us would have done any better. A lot of Paul’s insights and ways he put things together have great value in different ways, but the fact that we assume that Paul was somehow channeling God in his ideas and writings is our fault and not his.

It makes complete sense why Paul did what he did, and he should not be faulted for this. The burden is on us to apply critical thinking and a thorough investigation of the historical, cultural and personal factors that influence and shape all religion, including Christianity. A basic principle of this mindset is “consider the source,” which says that it is wise to consider all the factors that would have impacted and influenced the information and views presented by a particular source, in this case, Paul. Since Paul is the most influential figure in the conception of Christianity and Christian doctrine, it’s wise to understand Paul in this sense. One can appreciate the contribution of Paul without deifying his writings.

I find it curious that practically every creed of the Church, whether the early ecumenical creeds, the Roman Catholic creeds or the Protestant creeds are statements that outline the theological positions and doctrines of the Church, but hardly have any of the teaching of Jesus in them.

A person doesn’t have to be a Paul-hater. He was doing the best he could. Have a little compassion. How would Paul have known that scratching out letters to help sort out the challenges and problems of the early church were somehow going to be turned into the infallible Word of God for all humankind. That’s on us, not him. Paul did the best he could given the circumstances and where he was at in his own spiritual journey and evolution.

One should look upon Christian theology with some skepticism given that you can’t hardly find Jesus anywhere in it. We painted Jesus white and dressed him up in Christian theology, but the brown-skinned, Middle Eastern Jew who turned religion on its head, got lost some 2,000 years ago on the dusty roads of Nazareth.”

Rubbish.

What is gratuitously asserted can be gratuitously denied. The hoary claim that “Paul invented Christianity” coupled with the incredibly selective reading of the New Testament to invent a Jesus that agrees with whatever Jim Palmer (or whoever) thinks and who “would not have gotten along well” with Paul is pure eisegesis.

The reality is that Paul’s creativity lies, not in the invention of a belief in Jesus as the Son of God, nor in a faith that he was crucified for our sins and raised for our justification and seen by many witnesses beginning on the third day after his death, but in what those things (already preached by the apostles before Paul) implied for how we should live.

The logic of Palmer’s complaint leaps from the existence of creeds to the preaching of Paul and makes the mysterious complaint that because creeds do not center the moral, ethical, and social preaching of Jesus (which are carefully preserved in the gospels Palmer says are written under the influence of Paul) therefore Paul somehow drained the gospel of the teaching Jesus’ taught. This, not to put too fine a point on it, makes no sense.

In reality, of course, Paul’s letters are written to help the Christian community live out, among other things, the moral, social, and ethical teaching of Jesus. It’s true that, in the current Church, you can find many conservatives utterly contemptuous of Jesus’ teaching that the gospel is meant for the entire human race. What you cannot find in Paul is anything like a denial of that or an assertion of white supremacy. This is a massive anachronism by somebody who clearly has no sense of the Church as anything beyond what contemporary US conservatism says. Blaming that on Paul is ridiculous.

Similarly, the notion that Paul invented the idea of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection lying at the center of his mission is something that can only be achieved by simply ignoring the gospel accounts Palmer claims have been eclipsed by Paul and the Church. It is Jesus, according to the eyewitnesses whose testimony is preserved in the gospels, who again and again, insists that he is to suffer, die, and rise on the third day, and that this is both the fulfillment of his mission and the fulfilment of the law and prophets. Paul, by his own testimony, has not invented that tradition about Jesus, but *inherited* it. That’s why he keeps reminding his churches that “I delivered to you what I also received” (rabbinic jargon for “I’m reporting what the other apostles have always taught”) and it’s why nobody in the early Church say, “Hey! Waitaminnit! All the *other* apostles say Jesus was just an ethical teacher, not the Son of God, and *they* never say anything about him rising from the dead!”

Finally, a word about creeds: They do not exist to summarize the ethical, moral, and social teaching of Jesus, but neither do they exist to deny them. Rather, they exist to answer two heavily disputed questions in the early Church: Who do you say that I am? (a question Jesus himself put to his disciples and so it is hardly a “perversion” of his teaching for the Church to answer it) and “What did Jesus *do*?” Given that Jesus *three times* insisted that what he did was suffer, die, and rise on the third day and that this was, in fact, what he was commanding the Church to tell the world in his Name, it is hard to see how this is a perversion of his teaching either.

Summarizing those two core issues about Jesus is not, the slightest, a denial of his moral, ethical, and social teaching. Nor does Paul deny them. Nor do the gospels that Palmer incoherently appeals to as preserving Jesus’ true teaching while also complaining that Paul has influenced and somehow corrupted them. On the contrary, the Creeds reaffirm that, since Jesus is (as Mark, the earlest gospel, tells us in his very first words, the Son of God) then we bloody well better do as he teaches in his moral, ethical, and social teaching, because as the risen Son of God he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.

That US conservatism cannibalizes and corrupts the gospel for its own ends is not the fault of Paul. Nor is it proof that creeds corrupt Jesus’ teaching. Nor is it evidence that the doctrines of the Church (I speak as a Catholic) corrupt the teaching of Jesus. Indeed, the intense hatred US conservatives have for Pope Francis makes rather clear that the attempt to identify that Freak Show with the gospel is a huge mistake.

I hope that explains why I think the whole “Paul invented Christianity and corrupted the teaching of Jesus” thesis is a crank reading of the NT that belongs in a well-deserved grave along with phrenology and geocentrism.