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begemots @ 09:53 pm: Et tu Jim
Interesanti. Droši vien klasificējas kā herētiķis, bet, nu, ne par to stāsts.

Modern Christianity is largely Pauline Christianity.

That statement is not an attack on Paul. It is simply a recognition of history. The central creeds of Christianity contain remarkably little of the ethical teaching of Jesus. They are overwhelmingly concerned with metaphysical claims about his nature, death, resurrection, and cosmic significance.

The Sermon on the Mount, the parables, the radical inversion of power, the critique of religious authority, and Jesus' vision of the Kingdom of God occupy surprisingly little space within the doctrinal architecture that eventually emerged. You cannot pin Christianity on Jesus. Christianity as we know it is the product of a long historical development, and no individual shaped that development more than Paul.

Paul's letters were written before the gospels and became the earliest documents of the New Testament. It is entirely possible that the theological categories Paul employed influenced the writers of the synoptic gospels themselves. By the time orthodoxy emerged, Paul's interpretations had become woven into the very fabric of Christian thought. Western Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant, is fundamentally Pauline in its assumptions and structure.

I suspect Jesus and Paul would have had profound disagreements. Jesus was a brown-skinned Jewish teacher announcing the Kingdom of God and overturning conventional notions of purity, power, and religious status. Paul, shaped by his own Pharisaic training and his encounter with the risen Christ, developed an elaborate theological framework that interpreted Jesus' death through sacrificial and redemptive categories. Jesus himself might have been astonished by much of the mythology and theology eventually attached to his name.

Perhaps Paul's most consequential move was interpreting the Roman execution of Jesus through the lens of sacrificial atonement. The Jewish image of the Passover lamb became the model through which Jesus was understood as the Lamb of God whose blood removed the sins of humanity.

Over time Christianity became organized around the cross itself. In this sense, Paul helped transform Christianity into what might almost be called Cross-tianity. Significantly, the earliest followers of Jesus did not go around wearing crucifixes or carving crosses. The cross as a dominant devotional symbol emerged centuries later. The first known crucifix imagery appears only many generations after Jesus and Paul were gone.

Yet none of this requires hostility toward Paul. He was not attempting to create an infallible religion for future civilizations. He was writing occasional letters to struggling communities attempting to sort out practical and theological questions. He found himself in the strange and unenviable position of becoming the resident expert on Christianity. One could reasonably ask, "Who died and made Paul pope?" Nobody did. History simply placed him there.
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