This is an excerpt from the book entitled
The Light Shineth in Darkness, Studies in revelation after Christ by Udo Schaefer. This section explains how Paul changed the Christianity of Jesus. It is important to note that the views expressed by this author reflect his individual perspective and do not represent the official views of the Baha'i Faith.
There is no link to this book and that is why I had to type up and post this section of the book. It took a long time. I am very interested in getting some feedback on this subject but I might not have much to say. Since I am not at all proficient in the Bible I learn from reading what others post and in discussions with others.
PAUL
This is not the place for an extensive exposition of the dubiousness of the doctrinal structure of the Protestant churches or the defectiveness of the premises from which some churchmen make their judgments. But I would like to explain as concisely as may be how the Baha’is, starting from their belief in the unity of religions, deal with the discrepancy between orthodox Church doctrine and Baha’u’llah’s mission.
It is an indisputable fact that religions have always changed in the course of their long history. Religion, unless it has become a faith of the ‘dead letter’, is a living thing, and to be living means to assimilate, to absorb and incorporate foreign matter. All religions have done this, and the clear source of revelation has become a broad stream made up of many tributaries. In the course of their history all religions have incorporated beliefs and practices alien to them in essence and have thereby departed from their source, the revelation. The religious heritage has been constantly increased, while the revelation has been obscured by human misinterpretations and misunderstandings.
This was also something realized by the leaders of the Reformation, who saw the Catholic Church as a falling away from the essential nature of Christianity, and tried to return to the pure teaching undistorted by human additions and misunderstandings. Such understanding has been the basis for the forming of all Christian sects and indeed for all the reformation in religious history. The question is whether the Reformers of Christianity attained their objective, whether they freed the pure teaching of Christ from its incrustations.
Martin Luther thought he had rediscovered in Paul (
Paulo reperi), and made the Pauline doctrine of man’s inability to keep the law (Romans 8:2 et seq.) the centre of Reformation theology. That was a double fatality within Christianity: that in the very early days a spiritual genius such as Paul should have taken God’s Cause out of the hands of the chose heirs and executors, the simple and uneducated apostles, and transformed it into an amalgam of Christian and pagan beliefs; and that Paul, of all men, who is responsible for the shift in emphasis, thus making way for an essential change in the Christian religion, should have been the man whose teaching the Reformation leaders took as guide-line and considered to be the message of Jesus. First then, there was the work of a usurper and the split he caused at the time of Christianity’s origin; second, Luther’s fatal mistake (and the mistake of his Christian successors) in finding the truth where in reality there was error.
That the figure of the Nazarene, as delivered to us in Mark’s Gospel, is decisively different from the pre-existent risen Christ proclaimed by Paul, is something long recognized by thinkers like Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Herder and Goethe, to mention only a few. The distinction between ‘the religion of Christ’ and ‘the Christian religion’ goes back to Lessing. Critical theological research has now disputed the idea of an uninterrupted chain of historical succession: Luther’s belief that at all times a small handful of true Christians preserved the true apostolic faith. Walter Bauer (226) and Martin Werner (227) have brought evidence that there was conflict from the outset about the central questions of dogma. It has become clear that the beliefs of those who had seen and heard Jesus in the flesh --- the disciples and the original community--- were at odds to an extraordinary degree with the teaching of Paul, who claimed to have been not only called by a vision but instructed by the heavenly Christ. The conflict at Antioch between the apostles Peter and Paul, far more embittered as research has shown (228) than the Bible allows us to see, was the most fateful split in Christianity, which in the Acts of the Apostles was ‘theologically camouflaged’. (229)
Paul, who had never seen Jesus, showed great reserve towards the Palestinian traditions regarding Jesus’ life. (230) The historical Jesus and his earthly life are without significance for Paul. In all his epistles the name ‘Jesus’ occurs only 15 times, the title ‘Christ’ 378 times. In Jesus’s actual teaching he shows extraordinarily little interest. It is disputed whether in all his epistles he makes two, three or four references to sayings by Jesus. (231) It is not Jesus’ teaching, which he cannot himself have heard at all (short of hearing it in a vision), that is central to his own mission, but the person of the Redeemer and His death on the Cross.
Paul, however, did not pass on the revealed doctrine reflected in the glass of the intellectual categories of his time, as is often asserted; he transformed the ‘Faith of Jesus’ into ‘Faith in Jesus.’ He it was who gave baptism a mysterious significance, ‘so as to connect his mission with the experience of initiates in Hellenic mystery cults’, (232) he turned the last supper into a sacramental union with the Lord of those celebrating it; (233) he was responsible for the sacramentalization of the Christian religion, and took the phrase ‘Son of God’--- in the Jewish religion merely a title for the Messiah --- to be an ontological reality. The idea of the Son of God, come down from heaven to earth, hitherto inconceivable to Jewish thought, (234) was taken from Paul from the ancient religious syncretism of Asia Minor, to fit in with the need at the time for a general savior. It is generally accepted by critical scholarship that the godparents were the triad from the cult of Isia (Isis, Osiris and Horus) and also Attis, Adonis and Hercules. Jesus, who never claimed religious worship for himself was not worshipped in the original community, is for Paul the pre-existent risen Christ.
The most essential and effective alteration of Jesus’s message carried out by Paul was in denying the Law’s power of salvation and replacing the idea of the Covenant, (235) the objective principle of the Jewish religion, with faith in Christ and the atoning power of his sacrificial death; the concrete mosaic law with a mystical doctrine of salvation. Here the Cause of God was robbed of its proper centre and transformed into a mixture of Judaism, Christianity and paganism. The original community recognized the devastating effect of the ‘Apostle to the Gentiles’ and did not watch it passively. The Jerusalem community sent teachers (‘false brethren’, Paul called them) to the new communities founded by Paul; they taught the true doctrine to the believers only just won for the Faith and opposed the doctrine taught by Paul. (236) Paul was such a controversial figure that Tertullian, in his pamphlet attacking Marcion, called him ‘Apostle to the Heretics’, and the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies declared him a false teacher, even indeed the anti-Christ.
This was the ‘Fall’ of Christianity: that Paul with his ‘Gospel’, which became the core of Christian dogma formation, conquered the world, (237) while the historic basis of Christianity was declared a heresy, the preservers of the original branded as ‘Ebionites.’ As Schoeps puts it, the heresy-hunters ‘accused the Ebionites of a lapse or relapse into Judaism, whereas they were really only the Conservatives who could not go along with the Pauline-cum-Hellenistic elaborations’. (238) Schonfield comes to the same conclusion: ‘This Christianity in its teaching about Jesus continued in the tradition it had directly inherited, and could justifiably regard Pauline and catholic Christianity as heretical. It was not, as its opponents alleged, Jewish Christianity which debased the person of Jesus, but the Church in general which was misled into deifying him.’ (239) ‘Pauline heresy served as the basis for Christian orthodoxy, and the legitimate Church was outlawed as heretical’. (240) The ‘small handful of true Christians’ was Nazarene Christianity, which was already extinct in the fourth century.
226.
Rechtglaubigkert und Ketzerei im altesten Christentum.
227.
Die Geschichte des cristlichen Dogmas.
228. Notably Schoeps,
Theologie und Geshichte des Judenchristentums and Schonfield, Those Incredible Christians. 229. Acts 15:1 et seq.; also Galatians 2:11. See Stauffer,
Kum Kalifat des Jakobus, p. 199.
229. Acts 15:1 et seq.; also Galatians 2:11. See Stauffer, Kum Kalifat des Jakobus, p. 199.
230. Schoeps,
Paulus, p. 50.
231. From Paul, we hear nothing, for example, of the Parables, the Sermon on the Mount or the Lord’s Prayer. See Albert Schweitzer,
The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle.
232. Schoeps,
Paulus, p. 112.
233. ibid., p. 110 ff.
234. The idea that God in his essence was walking on earth is inconceivable also ion Islam (
Qur’an, surahs 112; 2:110; 19:91-4; 5:76-8; 4:169, 170) and in the Baha’i Faith: ‘Beware, lest thou be led to join partners with the Lord, they God. He is and hath from everlasting been, one and alone, without peer pr equal, eternal in the past, eternal in the future. Detached from all things, ever-abiding, unchangeable, and self-subsisting. He hath assigned no associate unto Himself in His Kingdom, no counselor to counsel Him, none to compare unto Him, none to rival His glory.’ ‘Know thou of a certainty that the Unseen can in no way incarnate His Essence and reveal it unto men’ (Baha’u’llah,
Gleanings, XCIV and XX).
235. So far as the idea of the ‘New Covenant’ is at all expressed (e.g., I Corinthians 11:26 or Ephesians 2:11 et seq.), it comes about in the ‘Being in Christ’. This is the most profoundly Christian idea: ‘If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature’ (II Corinthians 5:17) but that is a quite different principle, not a covenant with God.
236. E. Meyer,
Ursprung and Anfange des Christentums, vol. III, p. 441; Schonfield, p. 179 ff.
237. Not least because Paul ‘the allegorizing Midrash teacher expressly abolished the whole law of ritual and ceremonial . . . for the new religion’ and because ‘this religion with its belief in a Son of God and the atoning power of his martyr’s death could link up well with the ideas held and spread in the mystery cults of the time --- which was simply not possible from the premises of the Mosaic law and its ethical strictness’ (H.J. Schoeps,
Judisch-christliches Religionsgesprach, p. 53).
238.
Theologie und Geschichte des Judenchristentums, p. 322, p. 322, f.n.1
239. Schonfeld, op. cit., p. 118.
240. ibid., p. 56.
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