Christianity is a combination of Hellenistic Greek religious motifs with Jewish concepts. Paul is the real founder of Christianity
Paul distorted Jesus' teachings and was instrumental in the church's "deviation" from Jesus' teaching and practices. Paul spoiled the message of Jesus. Paul started the myth of the following example.
Making the Jews the villains
Making Jesus divine
Jesus' death being seen as atonement for human sin
Making Jesus the Saviour
So are you saying it was Paul who wrote all the other gospels as well ?
or they were just made up by others?
I believe original sin was mentioned in the old testament as well as the prophecies of Jesus coming to earth to atone for all sin.
Paul did not make Jesus the Savior , it is Christ Himself who tells the apostles this...and through His death , resurrection and ascension into heaven, for which they were witnesses to, proves it to be true.
Why would Paul make the Jews the villains ?
Paul himself was a Jew, as well as Jesus and all of the apostles.
I am not sure where you have obtained the information you base your accusations on, but I fear you are being mislead.
May we all be drawn to the REAL truth , especially those who sincerely seek it with an open heart.
I personally have read about many miracles and been witness to some , performed in the name of Jesus , and through the power of the Holy Spirit ,to have faith that God has answered my questions on the validity and truth of the Holy Trinity being the DIVINE truth.
God bless you Zolton, and may He show you His love, and draw you closer to His truth. May your guardian angel help in guiding you to that loving truth.
At the beginning of Christianity Jesus and Paul are regarded by Christians as the founder of their religion.But Paul is regarded as the great interpreter of Jesus' mission, who explained, in a way that Jesus himself never did, how Jesus' life and death fitted into a cosmic scheme of salvation, stretching from the creation of Adam to the end of time.
Jesus never knew Paul and they never once met. The disciples who knew Jesus best, such as Peter, James and John, have left no writings behind them explaining how Jesus seemed to them or what they considered his mission to have been.
Paul claimed that his interpretations came by personal acquaintance with the resurrected Jesus, even though he had never met him during his lifetime through vision.We know about Paul from his own letters and the book of Acts, which gives a full account of his life. In fact, he is the hero of Acts, which was written by an admirer and follower of his, named, and this Luke who was also the author of the Gospel of that name. Luke was not an immediate apostle of Jesus during Jesus lifetime and he had never met JesusImmediate after Jesus' death the leader of the Jerusalem Church is Peter then Jesus' brother James. Yet in the Gospels, this James does not appear at all as having anything to do with Jesus' mission and his story.
And this to ensure and erase Jesus' brother dames (and his other brothers) from any significant role in the Gospel story.
A plan to denigrate the early leaders who had been in close contact with Jesus. Those who were immediate close to Jesus regarded with great suspicion and dismay the Christological theories of Paul, flaunting his brand new visions in interpretation of the Jesus whom he had never met in the flesh. From certain of Paul's letters, particularly Galatians, it seems that the friction was more serious than in the picture given in Acts.
What would Jesus think of Paul
Paul's doctrine of Jesus is a daring departure from Judaism.Paul was advocating a doctrine that seemed more in common with pagan myths than with Judaism: that Jesus was a divine-human person who had descended to Earth from the heavens and experienced death for the express purpose of saving mankind.The Jews found this doctrine new and shocking and played no role in Jewish scripture
.Paul said that not only this doctrine doctrine was new but added that that every line of the Jewish scripture was a foreshadowing of the Jesus-event as he understood it.
And those who understood the scripture in any other way were failing in comprehension of what Judaism had always been about.
Paul regarded much of the Old Testament as obsolete, superseded by the advent of Jesus.So Paul was disconnecting himself with Judaism and the first Christian Jerusalem church headed and led by James (Peter was to weak and too unorganized ) and Paul was adhering to resurrected gods and Gnostic myths of heaven-descended redeemers that existed in the past.
Paul's writings and those of the Early Apostles, reveal how Greek motifs were given "a new twist" and adapted to the story of Christ. As more Gentile converts flooded into the Early Christian church, they brought with them Greek religious notions which were re-formatted into a Christian "Gospel". The original Jewish element represented by James and Jesus himself , eventually was replaced by Paul's Gentile church.
Judaism could not tolerate the heretical Christian church which had embraced Greek religious notions.
Tied with the notions of a dispensation and millennium is the idea of a Judgement of the Dead and the punishment of the bad people.
The truth is that the Old Testament does not portray Hell or the Underworld (called Sheol in Hebrew) as a fiery place.
There is no mention of a Lake of Fire, or of individuals being bound and tormented (punishments) in the Underworld.
Paul and the early Christians of the gentile church of Paul apparently drew upon Greek myths about the Judgement, punishment and resurrection of the dead after a thousand years, as preserved in Plato's writings and many others.Perhaps Early Christian notions about a narrow pathway to Heaven and a broad pathway to Hell (Matthew 7:13) is borrowing from the above Platonic notion of "a path" to the Isles of the Bless and "a path" to Tartarus (Hell)?
Early Christian notions about "the binding" with chains of Satan and his angels, hurling them into the bottomless abyss, was drawn upon Plato's motif of the wicked being bound and hurled into Tartarus, which is described as far removed from earth as is heaven (the lower-most portion of Hell reserved for punishments of the wicked). The incorrigible Titans were bound in chains, and kept in Tartarus in Hesiodic myths.Paul was never a Pharisee rabbi but was tied in with the Sadducees, as a police officer under the authority of the High Priest, before converting to is belief in Jesus.
Also he deliberately misrepresented his own biography in order to increase the effectiveness of missionary activities.
Jesus and his immediate followers were Pharisees. Jesus had no intention of founding a new religion.
Jesus regarded himself as the Messiah in the normal Jewish sense of the word meaning a human leader who would restore the Jewish monarchy, drive out the Roman invaders, set up an independent Jewish state, and inaugurate an era of peace, justice and prosperity (known as 'the kingdom of God,) for the whole world.
Jesus believed himself to be the one prophesied in the Hebrew Bible who would do all these things.
He was not a militarist and did not build up an army to fight the Romans.He was not as militant and a fiercely Zealot like his brother James because he believed that God would perform a great miracle to break the power of Rome on the Mount of Olives, as prophesied in the book of Zechariah.He had no intention of being crucified in order to save mankind from eternal damnation by his sacrifice.
He never regarded himself as a divine being, and would have regarded such an idea as pagan and idolatrous.The first followers of Jesus, under James and Peter, founded the Jerusalem Church after Jesus' death. They were called the Nazarenes, and were indistinguishable from the Pharisees, but beleived that Jesus ressurected, and that Jesus was still the promised Messiah.
meaning anointed one to rule politically and religiously.
They thought that he had been brought back to life after his death on the cross, and would soon come back to complete his mission of overthrowing the Romans and setting up the Messianic kingdom.
Jesus had observed the Jewish religious law all his life and had never rebelled against it.
His sabbath cures were not against Pharisee law.
The Nazarenes did not regard themselves as belonging to a new religion; their religion was Judaism. The Nazarenes became suspicious of Paul when they heard that he was preaching that Jesus was the founder of a new religion and that he had abrogated the Torah
. The Nazarenes ( the Jerusalem Church under James and Peter) broke irrevocably with Paul and disowned him because of his views..
In this new religion, the Torah was abrogated as having had only temporary validity. The central myth of the new religion was that of an atoning death of a divine being. Belief in this sacrifice, and a mystical sharing of the death of the deity, formed the only path to salvation.Paul derived this religion from Hellenistic sources, chiefly by a fusion of concepts taken from Gnosticism and concepts taken from the mystery religions.The combination of these new views of his with elements derived from Judaism, particularly the incorporation of the Jewish scriptures reinterpreted to provide a new background of sacred history for the new myth Paul alone was responsible and the creator of this.
These views were not in Jesus intention and he would of been been amazed and shocked at the role assigned to him by Paul as a suffering God.
As the Ebionites claim that Paul had no Pharisaic background or training, was the son of Gentiles, converted to Judaism in Tarsus, came to Jerusalem when an adult, and attached himself to the High Priest as a henchman.Disappointed in his hopes of advancement, he broke with the High Priest and sought fame by founding a new religion.
The Ebionites were the same group that had earlier been called the Nazarenes, who were led by James and Peter, who had known Jesus during his lifetime, and were in a far better position to know his Jesus aims than Paul, who met Jesus only in dreams and visions. When Jesus drank wine and broke bread at the Last Supper, he was doing what a Jew does every time he performs the Kiddush ceremony before a Festival or Sabbath meal.
When Jesus began his prayer with "Our Father that art in heaven..." he was following the pattern of Pharisee prayers which still form part of the Jewish Daily Prayer Book.The Epistles attributed to "Paul," never discuss a historical background of Jesus but deal exclusively with a spiritual being who was known to all gnostic sects for hundreds to thousands of years.
The first generation of Christians didn't see any need for a permanent written record of the sayings and stories of Jesus. Jesus' return and the restoration of the Kingdom of God on earth were imminent--why bother preserving stories if the world was about to end?
Stories were simply passed along orally, primarily as a means of preaching and convincing outsiders. But as the first generation began to die off and hopes for the Second Coming dimmed, there was a need to preserve Jesus' words and deeds for posterity.
Collections of stories about Jesus circulated in the early church, among them like The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Mary, and the Secret Book of John.
And they gave very different and in some cases conflicting accounts of the gospel and, most importantly, of Jesus' alleged resurrection.
The decision on which interpretation was "correct" was central to the future of the church. The earliest writings in the New Testament are actually Paul's letters, which were written about AD 50-60, while the Gospels were not written until the period AD 70-110.
Paul theories were already before the writers of the Gospels gave and embellish their interpretations of Jesus' activities.
The Gospels are based on traditions and even written sources which go back to a time before the impact of Paul.
These early traditions and sources are not completely taken out in the final version.
They valuable views keys of what the story was like before Paulinist editors pulled it into final shape.
Rival interpretations, which at one time had been orthodox, opposed to Paul's very individual views, now became heretical and were crowded out of the final version of the writings adopted by the Pauline Church as the inspired canon of the New Testament.The Jewish Messiah originally meant a divinely appointed king; David, Cyrus the Great, and Alexander the Great are examples of such. Later, especially after the failure of Bar Kokhba's revolt, the figure of the messiah was one who would deliver the Jews from oppression and usher in a new world.
* Simon (ca. 4 BC), a former slave of Herod the Great who rebelled.
* Athronges (ca. 3 BC)
* Judas of Galilee (?), son of Hezekiah/Ezekias, a member of the Zealots faction who led a bloody revolt against a Roman census in AD 6. (JA18)
* Jesus of Nazareth (ca. 4 BC - AD 30-?), a wandering prophet and teacher who was crucified by the Romans; Jews who believed him to be the Messiah were the first Christians, also known as Jewish Christians.
* Theudas (? - 46), who attempted a short-lived revolt against the Romans before being slain. (JA20.5.1)
* "Egyptian Prophet", c.55, (an allusion to Moses), with 30,000 unarmed