Paul Started Christianity

[Guest Eric Zuesse]

Will someone please reply to

 

http://uncrediblehallq.blogspot.com/2007/0...triloquist.html,

where Christopher Hallquist insists upon misinterpreting things?

[Eccles]

This my reply that I posted on that blog:

 

What is the point of any serious discussion on the worst plagiarised book of fiction ever written: "The Holey Babble". Nobody will ever know who wrote it or will ever find the authored MSS. Christianity is based on two lies: that there is a god and Jesus was the son of that god. It is all copied from Babylonian and Egyptian Myths

[EdwardAbbey]

This my reply that I posted on that blog:

 

What is the point of any serious discussion on the worst plagiarised book of fiction ever written: "The Holey Babble". Nobody will ever know who wrote it or will ever find the authored MSS. Christianity is based on two lies: that there is a god and Jesus was the son of that god. It is all copied from Babylonian and Egyptian Myths

 

Right on bro.

 

Christianity is a load of bullshit !

 

It is nothing more than born-again insanity.

[Guest Eric Zuesse]

The two commentators here are pouring forth their feelings toward Christianity but not addressing the point at issue, which is to do a better job of understanding how the moral base of our society started.

 

Referring to Christianity as "Babylonian and Egyptian myths" or as "bullshit" doesn't address the question of how a better approach can be found to determine precisely what caused Christianity. Obviously, Christianity is different from "Babylonian and Egyptian myths" and different from bovine excrement.

 

The book which Chris Hallquist attacked without reading attempts to do a better job of understanding how the moral base of our society started. His "review" of the book was based on his having read http://mediapredict.com/market/show/5430. Maybe somebody here can address how that webpage squares with what Hallquist said.

 

Essentially, Hallquist is saying that Paul didn't create Christianity and that no one did; that only abstract cultural forces (which he doesn't identify) did that, over many centuries. So, he's saying that Christianity never started -- it only developed over a period of centuries and had no start.

 

I grant that the current state of scholarship about the start of Christianity is poor, but does that mean nothing better is possible? The two commentators here are evidently assuming so. I do not agree with them.

[Grandpa Harley]

Actually Christianity, as a myth cycle, really only goes to Greek and Roman myths, although the liturgical side coming from Alexandria, makes free use of Osrian processional type ceremonies...

 

I sort of favour the idea that there was no 'Ground Zero' for Christianity in the organisational sense, until the tradition got frozen by the creed in the First Ecumenical Council... look upon it as the mass extinction of competing memes. Thus I'd posit that the meme line from Origen, Irenaeus, and Eusebius, looting the good ideas of Paul, Marcion and Arius, as well as 'pagaining' up the sect they're creating from Greek and Roman sources, thus utilising the Synoptic Gospels what were cast for a Hellenic audience.

 

So the Extinction Level Event that caused Christianity to emerge as it did was Nicaea. The next few hundred years, the subsequent Ecumenical councils are largely involved with papering over the cracks and semantics to claim the few extant sects after Nicaea were always 'cut from the same cloth' and got Borged. The origins pior to Nicaea as hazy for the simple reason there was no one 'Christian' tradition... looking at the Pre-Nicaea texts still extant you have Jesus as Jewish Teacher/Sage (Thomas) through to capricious, nasty ManChild-God, with the body count to match (Infancy Gospel of Thomas - an interpolation in the Lukian tradition)...

 

I'd agree that people get their emotions in the way of history...

[Eccles]

The two commentators here are pouring forth their feelings toward Christianity but not addressing the point at issue, which is to do a better job of understanding how the moral base of our society started.

 

Referring to Christianity as "Babylonian and Egyptian myths" or as "bullshit" doesn't address the question of how a better approach can be found to determine precisely what caused Christianity. Obviously, Christianity is different from "Babylonian and Egyptian myths" and different from bovine excrement.

 

The book which Chris Hallquist attacked without reading attempts to do a better job of understanding how the moral base of our society started. His "review" of the book was based on his having read http://mediapredict.com/market/show/5430. Maybe somebody here can address how that webpage squares with what Hallquist said.

 

Essentially, Hallquist is saying that Paul didn't create Christianity and that no one did; that only abstract cultural forces (which he doesn't identify) did that, over many centuries. So, he's saying that Christianity never started -- it only developed over a period of centuries and had no start.

 

I grant that the current state of scholarship about the start of Christianity is poor, but does that mean nothing better is possible? The two commentators here are evidently assuming so. I do not agree with them.

 

---------------------------------------------------------------

Eric, you have made a not unreasonable criticism of my reference to Babylonian and Egyptian myths. May I refer you to a Web Site I use frequently as a reference to this: Biblical Origins in Ancient Egypt -

http://home.austarnet.com.au/calum/egypt.html

 

I do know the author of this Site and he is at a University in Australia working in Egyptology. It is a large site, but if you take the time to read it you will see what I mean. I will be interested in your comments about it.

 

Regards.

[Guest Eric Zuesse]

Eccles, it's not relevant to what interests me, which is to understand the event that created Christianity. People speak about Christian origins as if the start of Christianity were some sort of happening, divorced from the personal agendas of individual human beings. Now, I understand that our religious culture does encourage this type of thinking, because it places history in a context which is shaped quite possibly more by some unseen deity behind the scenes than by individual human beings interacting in specific circumstances and carrying out very personal agendas. But I don't go along with it at all; I think it's just more of the same old (religious-type thinking) ... but in a different-colored bottle.

 

Right after the Foreword to my book, in which I describe the legal/forensic methodology which will be applied in it, is a summary of the historical narrative which this work will document. Here is that summary:

 

Summary

 

The start of Christianity is described in a letter, Galatians, written in or around the year 54. This letter discussed an action four years earlier, by its writer, Paul, for which he felt both pride and shame, so that his account reflected that inner conflict. A former Jew, Paul was addressing the congregants of a certain synagogue whose members were Gentiles whom Paul himself had converted to a Jewish sect, which had been founded by Jesus of Nazareth little more than twenty years earlier. Paul was trying to persuade his readers to leave Judaism altogether, and to convert to the religion that he had founded at this event. He called this religion “the gospel of Christ,” and he didn’t inform his readers that it was different from the small Jesus sect of Judaism that he had originally converted them to — Paul described this “gospel of Christ” in terms that sounded Jewish, even though this “gospel” actually entailed a repudiation of Judaism.

 

Paul was pretending to be a follower of Jesus, because Paul had originally converted his followers to Jesus’s Jewish sect, and he couldn’t afford to tell them outright that he was abandoning Judaism altogether and starting a new religion. Paul’s office was in Antioch, where his followers were the first people to attach the name “Christianity” to his new faith. These people were so successful at such conversion-efforts, that this letter’s supernatural explanation of the background of this event he was writing about remained unquestioned for thousands of years by Christian believers. But finally, after centuries of accumulated scholarship, and the application of modern legal/forensic investigative techniques to the analysis of the evidence, the actual conditions under which this momentous creation-event of Christianity occurred are exposed to the public. And it turns out that Paul’s followers — not Jesus’s — wrote the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament: it turns out that Christianity is a hoax, and that Christ was to Paul as Charlie McCarthy was to Edgar Bergen. Paul and his followers served as a ventriloquist-team, which placed into the mouth of their Christ what subsequently became known as the sayings of “Jesus.”

 

Jesus had actually died as a Jew, whose Jewish sect was hijacked at this event which Paul obliquely described in this letter. Paul and his followers replaced Jesus’s rag-tag small and powerless group by the rapidly growing entirely new religion that’s now known as Christianity. Paul possessed the audacity to aim for the future conversion of Rome’s Emperors (the very organization which had actually crucified Jesus), so that those Emperors would eventually spread Paul’s new religion throughout their realm, which they ended up doing hundreds of years later. But Paul also possessed the wisdom to understand that no such elite appeal would succeed unless he supplemented it with a deal that appealed also to the masses. He knew that they were seeking the easiest-to-obtain ticket of admission into heaven, for after they died. So, at this event, he lowered the admission-price below that of the Jewish competition. The Jewish admission-price into heaven was that one must follow all of God’s commandments. Paul reduced this price to only having faith in Jesus as the Christ. Paul’s scheme worked; his new religion mushroomed. Paul thus turned out to be the most powerful person in human history, just as he hoped. Jesus, a poor, illiterate, devout Jew, who had possessed the charisma that Paul lacked, became, after death, nothing more than Paul’s tool and historical victim. Decades after Jesus’s death, Paul picked up his corpse — what was left of Jesus, the public recollection of his charisma — and Paul used it, to great effect, as his own dummy. Thus, Christ “spoke.”

 

Paul’s biggest discount of the Jewish price on heaven was his eliminating the requirement (Judaism’s signature commandment, Genesis 17:14) that a man must become circumcised. In the First Century, neither anesthesia nor antibiotics existed, and so for the adult male Gentiles Paul was seeking to convert, any such medical operation was torturous and a mortal threat. Paul replaced circumcision with mere baptism — a ceremonial dunking in water — as the new faith’s initiation ritual. This was Paul’s big breakthrough; a man could now be admitted into heaven without a medical operation. So, Christianity boomed.

 

Paul’s followers, who wrote the four canonical Gospels, transferred the blame for Jesus’s crucifixion from the Romans, who actually did it, onto the Jews, whom Jesus had actually tried to lead against the Romans. Thus, Paul’s followers changed the reason for the crucifixion from Rome’s actual charge, which had been sedition, to Paul’s mythological charge, rejection of Jesus by the Jews due to “blasphemy.” This was done so as to appeal to the Romans, to meet the needs of the Emperors and of the Roman Empire that had actually crucified Jesus. Paul’s aim was to enable the Roman Emperors to adopt Christianity ultimately, so that they would impose it upon their realm.

 

---------

 

Here is the narrative’s climax, the actual event that created Christianity:

 

After Paul’s having collected thousands of Gentile “converts” to the Jesus sect of Judaism over 17 years, by telling men that they could win an eternity in heaven just by declaring faith in Jesus as the Christ, and that they didn’t need to go under the knife in order to win heaven, the majority of the members of the Jesus sect were by now (in the year 49 or 50) uncircumcised Gentiles. (Women simply didn’t count; they were just property — of men.) As a consequence of this growing Gentile predominance, a terrific pressure built up within the sect, and it had to be resolved by the sect’s leader, who was Jesus’s brother James. (The leader wasn’t Peter, such as the myth asserts). This pressure upon James came from the born Jews, not only from the original Jewish followers of Jesus, but also from other born Jews within the sect, and even from born Jews outside the sect who didn’t accept Jesus as being the mashiach, the legendarily foretold inheritor of the House of David. All of those men had been circumcised shortly after birth, and the pressure coming from them now was directed at getting Paul’s thousands of adult Gentile men circumcised, in accord with Judaism’s basic commandment, Genesis 17:14. In that commandment, God had allegedly told Abraham, “No man who is uncircumcised will be one of my people.” This commandment from the alleged God was the alleged start of Judaism, in the ancient Jewish legend. It was the only basis upon which Paul’s thousands of men could be accepted by other Jews as being Jews. So, after 17 years of Paul’s ministry, James called together a council in Jerusalem to discuss whether or not Paul’s men, uncircumcised as they were, and thus in such blatant violation of Judaism’s signature commandment, were or weren’t members of Jesus’s Jewish sect. At first (in Galatians 2:10), James decided that yes they were members. James simply didn’t want to lose the vast majority of his sect. But as soon as this conference ended and Paul returned to Antioch, James changed his mind and sent Peter (who had been Paul’s teacher) to Antioch to bring Paul the bad news — that all of his men would have to become circumcised; they’d all have to go under the knife, or else get out of the sect. James also sent a backup team, to arrive after Peter, to make sure that Peter did what he was instructed to do. (James knew that Peter was reluctant to do this.)

 

Galatians 2:11-21 presents an embarrassed and nervous Paul recounting to the Galatians the event which had actually started Christianity (he couldn’t afford to admit to them that this was its start); and, in this account, Peter simply lacked the stomach to inform Paul of the bad news from James. Peter instead sat down to dinner at Paul’s headquarters, with Paul’s uncircumcised followers. Then, James’s backup team arrived, and saw that Peter was dining with Paul’s uncircumcised men, not telling Paul that they needed to become circumcised before they could be authentic followers of Jesus. In 2:16, Paul said that on this occasion, which (as was mentioned) had occurred in the 17th year of Paul’s membership in the Jesus-following sect, he had announced that the Jewish covenant was finished, that it was simply ended, and that God’s new “gospel of Christ” entails merely faith in Jesus as the Christ, and thus a total repudiation of Judaism: Paul said, in 2:16, “no man wins God’s approval by following God’s commandments.” God’s commandments were Judaism; God’s commandments were the very core of the Jewish faith. Paul thus renounced Judaism on this momentous occasion, and he announced Christianity: “A person wins God’s approval only through Christ-faith, never by following God’s Law.”

 

The real reason for his overthrowing God’s commandments here was that he didn’t want to impose circumcision upon his men in an era that had neither anesthesia nor antibiotics. Paul knew that the circumcision-commandment, which created Judaism, couldn’t be overthrown without overthrowing the entire Jewish covenant to which it signed. And Paul knew that if circumcision were demanded of his followers, then he’d lose practically all of them; so, he went off on his own, into an entirely new religion, his “gospel of Christ,” which he first described during the event that he recounted in Galatians 2:11-21.

 

Paul, in Galatians, didn’t mention that James had changed his mind and had decided that Genesis 17:14 needed to be imposed after all in order for Paul’s men to continue being members of the Jesus sect of Jews. Paul simply couldn’t bring himself to admit this, because if his Galatian readers were to be informed that the sect’s leader, James, now demanded circumcision, then those Galatians would be made conscious that by their staying in Paul’s congregations they’d no longer be members of the Jesus sect, and they’d then have abandoned both James and Paul. They’d have abandoned the Jesus sect on account of refusing to go under the knife in an era without anesthesia and antibiotics; and they’d have abandoned Paul’s congregations because they’d know that Paul’s congregations were in violation of Jesus, and weren’t even Jewish at all.

 

Paul and James were now locked in the equivalent of a bad marriage which couldn’t be ended. Divorce was too painful for either to carry out. If James were to announce publicly that Paul’s men were no longer his followers, then James’s poverty-stricken group in Jerusalem would no longer continue to receive the financial contributions coming in from Paul’s far better-off Gentile congregations throughout the rest of the Roman Empire. James’s desperate followers were now financially too dependent upon the far larger number of Paul’s followers. And so James remained quiet about his change-of-mind; he didn’t want his followers to suffer. And Paul, for his part, continued telling his followers to contribute to the group in Jerusalem, because Paul needed the at-least-tacit acceptance of James’s group to continue for a long enough time for Paul’s new faith to be able to go out ultimately publicly on its own, as an entirely new religion abandoning its Jewish status.

 

James’s group faded away. But Paul’s blossomed and thrived. One reason why Paul’s group grew was that Paul was telling people that they don’t need to go under the knife in order to win an eternity in heaven. Another reason was that in Romans 13:1-7 and elsewhere, Paul and his followers told their followers that the laws which they should adhere to were not the ones from Judaism’s God, but the ones which the Roman Emperor of the time was imposing. Romans 13:1-7 and other passages made Rome’s Emperors, in effect, God’s agents upon Earth, imposing God’s will, and legislating on God’s behalf, so that, as Romans 13:5 put it, “You must obey the Emperor not just because, as God’s agent, he’ll punish you for violating the law, but also as a matter of conscience.” This teaching by Paul and his followers was enormously helpful to the Emperors, and so they ultimately imposed Christianity throughout their realm.

 

When it’s understood that the four canonical Gospel accounts of Christ were written not by Jesus’s followers but by Paul’s, both the truths and the lies in the New Testament become fully explained, and make 100% sense. Even the NT’s internal contradictions now make sense.

 

Paul, in his own account in Galatians 2, had been faced with a painful choice: either he would follow his instructions from James and demand that his thousands of men become circumcised, or else he and his congregations would leave the sect and go off into the future as an entirely new religion, which renounces the covenant and God’s commandments. The first path would have led to Paul’s oblivion, because few of his men would have been willing to risk their lives in order to stay with him. Paul took the second path. This led to his starting a new religion, custom-tailored to become the world’s largest because it placed heaven on sale, and also because it created for the Roman Emperors a new universal or “Catholic” religion to replace the old parochial and merely local Roman gods.

 

Already before Paul’s time, the Emperors had been struggling with the inadequacy of their old religion, and they were thus beginning to declare themselves to be gods; Paul’s solution to their problem was the only way to make the Emperors’ subjects — not just in Rome but elsewhere, throughout the Empire — follow the Emperors’ commands as if those commands came from God; and so the Emperors adopted it.

 

However, now a way had to be found to explain Jesus’s crucifixion by the Roman authorities. (No Roman Emperor would endorse a religion which worshipped a man who was acknowledged to have been executed by one of the Emperor’s own predecessors.) Paul and his followers came up with a solution to that problem, too: The Jews (despite their having been conquered by the Romans) allegedly forced the Roman authorities to crucify Jesus for “blasphemy” against Jewish Law. This lie freed the Roman Emperors from any Deicide charge, that they had killed God. Without this lie, Paul and his people would have stood no chance of ultimately winning over the Emperors.

 

Thus, securing his support from both the mass base and the Imperial elite, Paul emerged to become the most powerful person in history, the creator of the world’s largest religion, just as he had hoped.

 

This history of the origins of Christianity is documented with full details in the following, in which the people who created the hoax wrote and displayed not only their hoax, but also — under the first-ever legal/forensic analysis of their writings — how and why they did it. Without necessarily assuming their testimony to be honest, but rather “cross-examining” them by placing their writings under a legal/forensic logical microscope which exposes both their explicit and their implied statements, and which distinguishes between the two levels of assertion, this history becomes revealed with stunning clarity, as we shall see.

[Guest Eric Zuesse]

Is anyone interested in this?

[Light_of_Reason]

I'm fascinated by it. I think I'll be reading the book.

[Eccles]

Eric. Re your post #8.

I have just read it quickly and printed it so I can read it more closely. It seems to be in agreement with what I have learned recently about Christianity and it's origins, especially St. Paul. I suffered about 30 years as a Roman Catholic all the time having serious doubts about it's doctrines and raison d'etre. It was my study of Astronomy and related Sciences that turned to to Atheism. Lately I have been reading a lot and finding out the truth about the lies and deception of Christianity (for that matter, all religion). I have also read about the frightening Theoracry of the United States of America, or as I like to call it: the United Christian States of America. I follow the NASA program closely and am disgusted how it's budget is being whittled down while the Military as an open check to kill more humans.

 

It is so sad to see in the 21st. Century with all the advances in technology that so many Americans still are sucked in by a stupid religion.

[Guest Eric Zuesse]

Eccles, I agree with you. My 2000 book, WHY THE HOLOCAUST HAPPENED: ITS RELIGIOUS CAUSE & SCHOLARLY COVER-UP, was the first-ever search through Hitler's private communications and his communications to friends and supporters to find whether he had ever explained privately and to his supporters why he wanted all Jews to be killed. The existing books on why the Holocaust happened contradicted basic and well-established facts which I knew, and so I decided to do my own investigation, because it seemed to me that unless the cause of the Holocaust is truthfully understood, there won't be any hope to prevent similar insanities from occurring in the future. What I found shocked me: Hitler was inspired to the Holocaust in 1919 when he first was entering politics. He was inspired to it by his reading of the Bible. He really meant it when he told a group of supporters on 18 December 1926, "The teachings of Christ have laid the foundations for the war against the Jews as the enemy of all mankind; the work that Christ began, I shall finish." In his private notes, he referred to the Bible as "the Monumental History of Mankind." To him, it was "History" and not myth. He even formulated his concept of "the Thousand-Year Reich" from Revelation 20:1-7. But, when I spoke with the world's leading scholars of Hitler and the Holocaust, I was even more shocked that they didn't want this to become widely known; they have such contempt of the public that they think that if the public were to know that Hitler was deeply religious, then Christians, especially Christian literalists or fundamentalists like Hitler was, would think that the Holocaust was okay. One of them, after reading my manuscript of WHY ..., told me "Mr. Zuesse, if your book is ever published it will be a very important book -- VERY important!" So I asked him, "Dr. ---, would you please put that in writing; it might help me to obtain a publisher for it." He replied, "Oh, no, I could never do such a thing; it might destroy my career." There's a scholarly ban against this truth.

 

So, I decided to dig further, to find out whether the passages in the New Testament which were especially important to Hitler in inspiring him to the Holocaust were true. That's what shocked me even more: They were not. This book, CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUIST, was the result.

 

So, I agree with you.