come on sunstone! how , how did a guy that wasn't a disciple manage to overrule the Christian church in Jerusalem, i don't get this bit it destroys the option for me of Christianity in my search the more i hear or read about this character. it seems to me that the religion of Jesus and whatever message he was trying to get across was lost or usurped by someone who never met him
. not only do i have to except Jesus as a matter of faith but Paul's revelation as well./ how did he do it
Nobody knows, but here's what I think.
Jesus embraced, and then led, a form of Judaism that has not survived. He was a disciple of John the Baptist, and was baptized by John (that's probably the most certain thing we know about him), and probably led an ascetic life similar to John's for a while. Luke tells us that John and Jesus were related through their mothers, and maybe they were, though Jesus came from Galilee and John seems to have come from Judaea. John and his followers weren't Pharisees or Sadducees or Samaritans, and I don't think they were Essenes, either. Maybe they were something like proto-Mandaeans, but I'm not sure what that proto-Mandaeanism would have looked like two millenia ago. Anyway, the Gospels tell us Jesus came from Galilee to be baptized by John, and I think he did.
I think the story of Jesus' forty day fast in the desert, being tempted by the devil, probably hints at a period of extreme asceticism, at the end of which he had a different understanding of Judaism. The Gospels portray John as Jesus' forerunner, and have him acknowledge Jesus, and make it seem natural for the disciples of John to follow Jesus, but they also preserve a tradition that John came to doubt Jesus, and while they have Jesus answering those doubts, they don't tell us whether John's doubts were resolved. They also hint at differences between the piety of John and the piety of Jesus:
And the disciples of John and of the Pharisees used to fast: and they come and say unto him, Why do the disciples of John and of the Pharisees fast, but thy disciples fast not?
The Mandaeans, holding John the Baptist as the last and greatest prophet, consider Jesus a false prophet. Maybe all this reflects a more or less open breach between Jesus and John, the disciple (Jesus) having come to a different understanding than the master (John).
If we can believe the Gospels, John and Jesus both believed something like the Pharisees. There doesn't seem to have been an open breach between John and the Pharisees, as there was between Jesus and the Pharisees. (If there
was a breach between Jesus and the Pharisees, and that's not just backdated to reflect the later breach between Christians and Rabbinic Jews.) The Gospels pointedly tell us that, like the Pharisees and unlike the Sadducees, Jesus believed in the resurrection. He apparently believed in angels, also like the Pharisees. If we can believe the Gospels, he continually defined his teachings by comparing them to those of the Pharisees. Pharisaism or something like it was probably the form of Judaism that was (or had been) normative to Jesus and his followers.
So, we know what happened to Jesus. After his death, the leadership of the community passed to his brother James. Acts tells us that the disciples of Jesus were still worshiping at the Temple, and Christian tradition tells us (oddly, in view of Paul's theology) that James worshiped at the Temple the rest of his life. The Jesus community under James didn't share Paul's idea that the crucifixion had rendered the Temple and its rites obsolete. The community seems to have sent out "missionaries" to other Jews, and to have admitted some Gentiles into the community, but it still remained basically a Jewish movement.
Then comes Paul. Paul was a religious visionary with a new message. He was, like most such visionaries -- John, Jesus, Bar Kokhba, Muhammad, Baha'ullah, Martin Luther, George Fox, Ann Lee, Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, Ellen White; you get the idea -- a little crazy and a little shifty. Paul was crazier and shiftier than most; his theology was haphazard, and his epistles were clearly tailored to meet the rhetorical needs of the moment. It's hard to know how much you can believe of what he says about himself. But he was convinced that his Jesus -- the mystical Jesus he encountered on the Damascus road and probably in the desert afterwards -- was the authentic Jesus and that he himself was the pre-eminent apostle of Jesus, whose understanding of Jesus far surpassed that of the people who had actually known Jesus in his lifetime. He was also an untiring missionary for his new vision, and one who didn't care whether Gentiles converts conformed to any aspect of Jewish religious custom. He gathered a following, and his compelling new religion began to spread throughout the Empire. As Muhammad after him expected the Jews to flock to his new vision, Paul expected the Jesus community to flock to his, and like Muhammad, Paul was disappointed. Probably some of them came around, but not many. Not that it mattered much, because Paul's Christianity quickly outstripped the Jesus community in numbers, influence, and geographical distribution.
I think there was a more or less open breach between Paul and James, with Paul not quite daring to challenge James' authority openly, but relentlessly pushing a Christianity that was repugnant to James. The New Testament tries to give us Peter as a bridge between James and Paul, but I don't buy it. If he was a bridge between the two for a while, I think the bridge broke down, and Peter likely remained faithful to James.
The sixties rolled around, and Peter, Paul, and James all died. There were probably already a number of related sects claiming Jesus as a prophet or a Messiah, and they hadn't yet sorted themselves out definitively. At Jerusalem, James was succeeded by Symeon as leader of the Jesus community. Orthodox Christian tradition tells us that Symeon was the son of Cleophas, Joseph's brother, and so the cousin of Jesus and James. The leadership of the historic community was still in the hands of Jesus' family. In the Pauline community, there was probably already a fledgling hierarchy, with secondary apostles, and bishops and presbyters.
Tradition says that Symeon led his community out of Jerusalem and across the Jordan before the First Jewish War, and soon thereafter Jerusalem and its Temple were destroyed. In the great cities of the Empire, Paul's Christianity began to institutionalize itself, and if Christians thought of Symeon at all, they probably thought of him as just another bishop, or just another secondary apostle, not somebody like Paul, but somebody more like Aquila. Maybe they just thought of him as Brigham Young's Mormons thought of Emma Smith and her companions: as those who had been left behind as the People of God moved on.
I think the Ebionites were the successors of Symeon's community. The Ebionites followed the Jewish Law, or at least their interpretation of it, which may have differed from that of the Pharisees, whose successors were meanwhile developing Rabbinic Judaism. The Ebionites didn't believe in the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, or the Resurrection. Eventually, Pauline Christians came to see the Ebionites as an heretical, "Judaizing" sect. I think the Ebionites were the more authentic Jesus community, and that it was the Christians who changed.
There are, to be sure, some difficulties in reconciling the Ebionites to the Jesus of the Gospels. For instance, they were -- or at least some of them were -- vegetarians. It's hard to be sure whether the inconsistencies betray further development in Ebionism, or just reflect the fact that the Gospels are Christian documents. Probably some of both.
Paul's Christianity flourished, growing from a marginal sect known for its appeal to women and slaves to a powerful organization with the full force of the Empire behind it. The Ebionites lasted at least a few hundred years. Christians noted them (as heretics) till the late fourth century, and they probably survived later than that. Some people think they survived long enough to influence Islam, and some think they see hints of an Ebionite remnant well into the second millenium C.E. Nobody knows for sure. The Ebionites faded away quietly, and nobody noted their passing.
Anyway, that's my theory.
