The Cult of Paul

Jesus and Paul: a Look at their Personalities ^{Back to Top ↑}

^{"In the teachings of Christ, religion is completely present tense: Jesus is the prototype and our task is to imitate him; to enliven his teachings and thereby ourselves become his disciples. And yet then through Paul came a fundamental alteration; with Paul drawing attention away from imitating Christ and fixing that attention on the death and rebirth of Jesus. What Martin Luther failed to realize is that even before Catholicism came along, Christianity had become degenerate at the hands of Paul. By making it a religion about worshiping Jesus instead of enlivening the internal Christ, Paul turned Christianity into the religion of Paul. In essence, Paul threw the Christianity of Christ away and completely turned it on its head, morphing it into a religion lauding the exact opposite of the original proclamations of Jesus." - Soren Kierkegaard}

^{"If Christianity needs an Anti-Christ, it needs look no farther than Paul... As represented in the Gospels (of Jesus) on one hand and Paul's epistles on the other we find two quite different kinds of men, and two quite different - if not fully opposing - spiritual traditions being inculcated. In the spirituality of Jesus Christ we find all the good that has ever been the result of biblical application, while in the religion of Paul we find all the disastrous mischief which has so indisputably flowed from the same." - Jeremy Bentham}

While it is true that exposing the vast differences in the lives and lifestyles of Jesus Christ and Paul of Tarsus^{(a la the evidence provided in the previous pages of this tome)} does not in and of itself prove that the two men espoused competing theologies, those differences in upbringing do explain what I will now show - namely, that Paul and Jesus exhibited stark discrepancies of basic personality and character; discrepancies that do not always mandate the development of different spiritual beliefs, and yet discrepancies that can help us to understand the same.