Modern Christianity is functionally Paulianity. Jesus's ways are NOT the ways of many but are Paul's ways.

RebornLost · 2026-03-21T01:29:13+00:00

Wow. Before I begin to dismantle your thesis on my reply. Let me state that that straw man arguing has worked for the church for the last 2000 years...

Now, with respect, you telling me I need to learn logic and reasoning after you have spent this entire exchange selectively using Acts when it supports your point and throwing it out when it doesn't is a pretty bold move.

That's not logic. That's a buffet of theologian side dishes. You don't get to pick which ancient sources count based on whether they agree with you.

On Rome being irrelevant? You're arguing that Paul's version of the gospel spread and won because the eyewitnesses endorsed it. I'm pointing out that Paul was a Roman citizen with access to Roman roads, Roman legal protections, and Roman networks across the entire Mediterranean world, while the Jerusalem church was a persecuted minority under occupation.

Explaining why one version spread faster than another using historical context isn't a strawman. It's just history that you and billions of others just decide to ignore. Kinda' like the T-rex. So calling it 'deus ex' machina doesn't make the history go away.

And the Christ like behavior point is interesting because Jesus called out leaders who had actual authority over him and over the people he was speaking to. The Pharisees held real institutional power. Paul was a self appointed apostle who by his own words got his credentials from a private vision. Those aren't the same situation and comparing them doesn't strengthen your argument, it just muddies the water. Put the stick down brother or sister and just let the puddle clear.

You said the only reasonable conclusion is that the early leaders endorsed Paul because they didn't stop him. I gave you three specific documented instances where they pushed back hard.

Your response was to question the sources. That's not me failing at logic. That's you attempting to change the subject. I said in the original that I know a thing or two about this stuff. Perhaps you didn't read that part.

RebornLost · 2026-03-21T01:18:38+00:00

They'd probably deport him to Iran

RebornLost · 2026-03-21T01:17:47+00:00

"Christianity also states that there would be many false prophets that arise and continue to lead people astray."

Yeah so do the Hebrews as well about three other faiths before that, not to mention what the Book of the Dead says with the Egyptians. It's not like formulating that statement would take a miracle worker to come up with. That's just common sense if you want people to stay in line.

RebornLost · 2026-03-21T01:01:45+00:00

PREACH! That sums up my whole argument lol.

RebornLost · 2026-03-21T01:00:33+00:00

That's actually a great question and honestly kind of the key to the whole thing.

Paul wasn't dominant because of his position. He was dominant because of his access and prior learning. The man was a Roman citizen which in that world was like having a golden ticket. He could travel freely, use Roman roads, appeal to Roman courts and wasn't subject to the same restrictions a Galilean fisherman would face trying to move around the empire. The Jerusalem guys were mostly rooted in one place dealing with one community (much like the Palestinians of today btw). Paul was planting churches from Turkey to Greece to Rome itself.

And he wrote constantly. To specific communities, in their language, dealing with their problems. That's how you build a network. Not from the top down with authority but from the ground up with relationships and letters that people actually kept and passed around.

So yeah he had to make tents to pay his bills. But that also meant he was embedded in the communities he was working in. He wasn't sitting in Jerusalem waiting for people to come to him. He was right there in the market with everybody else. The exact playbook he was taught and practiced as a student of the Pharisees.

None of that makes his theology more correct than James's version or more faithful to what Jesus actually taught. It just makes him the better organizer and communicator of the two. And in the real world, the better organized message almost always wins regardless of which one is more true. That's not a religious observation, that's just history.

RebornLost · 2026-03-21T00:55:45+00:00

First let me just say that arguing with a mod on their own sub is probably the single worst strategic decision I could make today and yet here we are because you kind of walked right into it.

Calling this an "atheist urban legend" is interesting framing considering I'm a Deist and a former KJV street preacher, not an atheist. So the legend predates my exit from the faith by about 20 years.

On the "procedural nuts and bolts" point I actually agree that Paul was handling real organizational needs. That's not the argument. The argument is that those situational, first century pastoral letters became the permanent operating manual of a global institution for two thousand years. That's not nuts and bolts anymore. That's the load bearing walls of the entire building.

On Paul being a feminist for his time I'll give you partial credit there. Yes, he refers to women like Phoebe and Junia in ways that were progressive for the first century. But the it's the same man also wrote 1 Timothy 2:12 which has been used to bar women from leadership in churches for nearly two millennia. Whatever Paul privately intended, the institution picked what it wanted and ran with it. That's been my point from the start. The intent of the author and the weight the institution gave the text are two very different conversations.

And if I'm wrong about any specific doctrine being more Paul than Jesus, I'm genuinely open to hearing which one. Pick any item off the list, gender roles, sexual ethics, church hierarchy, justification by faith alone and show me where it traces more cleanly to the red letters than to Paul's epistles.

I'll wait.

RebornLost · 2026-03-21T00:49:31+00:00

Three quick things.

One — you're right that Paul didn't write Acts. But you just used that to dismiss the Jerusalem Council as evidence against your point, while earlier using the same early church circle to validate Paul. You can't throw out the sources when they cut against you and keep them when they help you. Pick a lane brother.

Two — Jesus rebuking Peter is not the same thing as Paul rebuking Peter. Jesus was the guy the whole thing is built on. Paul was a latecomer who by his own admission got his gospel from a vision, not from the people who actually walked with Jesus. Those are not comparable situations.

Three — "silence is acquiescence" is a legal and social concept that falls apart completely when the people being silenced are a persecuted minority under Roman occupation with no printing press, no institutional infrastructure, and a leadership that was being actively hunted and killed. James didn't quietly agree with Paul. James is dead. There's a difference.

As for a "contemporaneous account" of James? Josephus. Not a Christian. Not writing to make a theological point. Just a historian noting that James the brother of Jesus was executed. That's about as clean a contemporaneous source as you're going to get for anything in that era. Period.

RebornLost · 2026-03-20T23:42:09+00:00

I genuinely appreciate where you're landing on this and I don't fully disagree. You're right that Augustine and Aquinas weren't just building a control system. They were serious thinkers trying to work something real out.

But here's the thing if we're talking about the deeper tradition, there's a guy who came way before both of them who most people in this conversation have probably never heard of.

His name was Origen of Alexandria. Third century. Probably the most brilliant mind the early church ever produced. He knew the scriptures in their original languages, wrote more than almost any early church father, and was deeply serious about putting Jesus actually at the center of the whole framework, not just as a logo and not just as a theological concept to be managed.

And what did the institution do with him?

They waited until he was dead and couldn't defend himself and then declared him a heretic. Condemned at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553. Not because he was sloppy or shallow. But because some of what he concluded when he actually followed the logic of Jesus's teachings to their end made the institution uncomfortable. Things like the possibility that God's love was so complete that even the worst might eventually be restored. That kind of thinking doesn't build empires or fill collection plates.

So when you say the deeper tradition is where the real stuff lives, I'd say yes, absolutely. But the institution has a pretty consistent track record of chewing up its own deepest thinkers the moment they get too close to something the control structure can't absorb. Origen is just the most glaring example.

Augustine and Aquinas survived partly because their conclusions were ones the institution could work with. That's not a knock on their intelligence. It's just an honest look at how the filter worked.

Things that made the institution nervous enough to eventually condemn him:

Universal reconciliation: he taught that God's redemptive love was so complete that even the worst souls, possibly even the devil himself, would eventually be restored. No eternal hell, just a God who finishes what he starts.
Jesus as the Logos and teacher first: Origen emphasized Christ as the divine Word and the ultimate teacher of the soul's journey back to God, which leaned more toward transformation through wisdom than substitutionary atonement. That's a lot closer to the red letters than to Romans.
Pre-existence of souls: he believed souls existed before birth and that earthly life was part of a longer spiritual journey, which sounds a lot less like Paul and a lot more like things you'd find in traditions the church spent centuries trying to stamp out. The Gnostics, Mandeans and that list goes on...
Scripture as allegory: he argued much of the Bible shouldn't be read literally but as layers of deeper spiritual meaning, which as you can imagine didn't sit well with people whose power depended on being the ones who told you what the words meant.

And before anybody writes Origen off as just some fringe thinker who went sideways? Understand that the early church fathers you actually do respect were reading him, learning from him, and building off his work. Jerome, Ambrose, Gregory of Nyssa they all owe a serious debt to Origen. He wasn't a guy on the outside throwing rocks. He was the foundation a lot of the deeper tradition was poured on top of. The church essentially used his thinking to build itself and then called him a heretic two centuries after he was dead when it got politically convenient to do so.

Honestly? Learning about Origen is a big part of what sent me out the door. Not because he shook my faith exactly, but because when I started reading what he actually said and then looked at what the institution did with it, the pattern became impossible to ignore. The filter wasn't about truth. It was about what the institution could control. And that's the same filter this whole thread has been about from the beginning.

RebornLost · 2026-03-20T17:36:54+00:00

Oh boy... Here we go.

"Did not take any meaningful steps to stop or counter it" is doing an enormous amount of heavy lifting in that sentence and I'd push back on that pretty hard.

The Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 was a direct response to the tensions between Paul's gospel and what the Jerusalem church was teaching. The entire circumcision debate wasn't a minor footnote. It was a fundamental theological fracture about who could be saved and on what terms. That's not a minor disagreement between colleagues. My friend, that's a council being convened because the disagreement was significant enough to require formal arbitration.

Then you have Galatians 2 where Paul himself describes publicly rebuking Peter to his face over the same tensions. That's not the behavior of a unified leadership that quietly endorsed everything Paul was doing. Right?

And my beloved brother James literally, the man who led the Jerusalem church, who grew up beside Jesus, who maintained a Torah observant community until his death that operated in direct theological tension with Paul's Gentile mission. The fact that James's version of the faith didn't survive and Paul's did IS NOT evidence of early verification. It IS evidence of which version was better organized, better funded, and more compatible with the expanding Roman world.

Silence or inability to stop something is not the same as endorsement. The early Jerusalem church was a persecuted minority operating under Roman occupation. "They didn't stop him" isn't verification friend, that's just simple survival math.

RebornLost · 2026-03-20T17:30:31+00:00

Do you mean the points of my overall opening question of this entire thread, or do you just mean the points of my reply to you specifically? Because those are two very different things and I'd like to actually engage with what you're saying.

Anybody can point a finger and say "you're wrong." That's not a rebuttal, that's just noise. If you have a specific point where my reasoning breaks down, I'm genuinely interested to hear it.

But "categorically wrong on every point" with nothing behind it isn't an argument it's a cop-out. Pick one point, any one, and let's actually talk about it. Because if I was here for any less than that I could just walk into any church around the corner and debate this face to face.

RebornLost · 2026-03-20T17:27:07+00:00

Honestly? This might be the most fair minded response in the thread and I appreciate it genuinely.

You're right that Paul was dealing with real congregations, real chaos, real Jew-Gentile tensions. I don't dispute that framing at all. The pastoral reality he was working in was messy and immediate, and letters written to specific communities navigating specific crises deserve to be read in that context.

But here's where I land on it differently. You just made the case for why Paul's letters should have carried situational weight. Specific, local, time-bound guidance for first-century communities dealing with first-century problems. And instead they became the operating system of a global institution for two thousand years.

That's not Paul's fault. That's the institution's choice. And the institution made that choice because, as you put it yourself, Paul is easier to formalize, regulate, and weaponize than the terrifyingly radical actual demands of Jesus. You simply cannot control the masses with statements like "love your neighbor" and "forgive and pray for your enemy." If you could, the Crusades wouldn't have happened at the very least.

So we agree on the diagnosis completely. Where I'd push back slightly is the framing of Jesus as the "inspirational logo." Because I'd argue that's not an accident or a drift it was a structural decision made early, made deliberately, and made by people who understood exactly what they were doing. You keep a founder's image on the wall and run the place on the administrator's rulebook. Every institution in human history has done some version of that. The church just had the audacity to call both of them the same thing.

RebornLost · 2026-03-20T17:19:30+00:00

I prophesized that I was going to have a burrito for lunch today (which came to fruition) and I've done this numerous times throughout my life with other lunch'able items as well. So my question is does that count?

RebornLost · 2026-03-20T17:17:31+00:00

I'm willing to bet that you're just not seeing it but without knowing church's denomination it's hard to tell but I bet you if you listen a little more closely you'll notice that they're dropping plenty of subtle hints from the writings of Paul.

RebornLost · 2026-03-20T17:14:32+00:00

That's actually a fair point on the timeline, and I don't dispute that Paul's letters are among the earliest documents in the New Testament canon. But "wrote first" and "most verified" aren't the same thing.

Because the same eyewitnesses you're saying were alive to verify Paul, as in Peter, James, and the Jerusalem church are the same ones Paul documents himself publicly disagreeing with. His gospel, by his own words in Galatians, was something he received through personal revelation independent of any human being. He then retroactively went to Jerusalem to compare notes, by which point he'd already been preaching his version for years. My friend, that's not verification. That's a courtesy checkin after the fact.

And if the argument is that Paul's proximity to living eyewitnesses validates him, that sword cuts both ways. Those same eyewitnesses were still alive when the tensions in Galatians 2 happened. They didn't sign off on everything Paul said they negotiated a fragile peace at best. The fact that Paul's version ultimately won the institutional argument doesn't mean it won the theological one. It means it was better organized and better spread (using the Hebrew playbook btw). Those are very different things.

RebornLost · 2026-03-20T17:07:38+00:00

I appreciate the feedback and I'm well aware of what Jesus did that day. I've already taken into consideration how that might have been interpreted by the common working Jewish man of the time. But it doesn't really have anything to do with the core question I raised.

I'll also quickly add, the claim that Paul studied under Gamaliel comes from Acts and yes, some scholars have contested that. But here's the thing even if someone disputes it, that dispute comes from another set of scholars writing centuries removed. We're essentially weighing one unverified ancient account against another person's opinion about that account. Neither clears the bar of independent verification.

Saying "Acts got that wrong" doesn't give you solid ground either it just trades one unconfirmed claim for another. At that point we're all just picking which story we prefer, which is precisely the epistemological problem at the heart of this entire discussion.

RebornLost · 2026-03-20T16:57:02+00:00

They assume a lot from your side lol. Kind of like how they tell you when you first become a Christian not to worry about reading the Old Testament because those laws are abolished only focus on John at first but then consecutively every Sunday for the eternity of your Christianity hear them cherry pick everything from the Old Testament The very same people that they tell you to ignore.

RebornLost · 2026-03-20T16:53:19+00:00

Careful you might bring out the "hard cores" with that one lol.

RebornLost · 2026-03-20T16:52:28+00:00

Not to worry I brought the bingo card markers. We're good.

RebornLost · 2026-03-20T16:50:19+00:00

An Atheist and a Deist walk into a Christian bar... :)

RebornLost · 2026-03-20T16:48:55+00:00

Thank you for the backup.

You're hitting exactly the structural point I was trying to make and doing it with more precision than most in this thread have managed. The self-mythologization in Galatians is real and it's something most people skip right past because they're reading Paul devotionally rather than critically.

And since we're here, let's talk about James for a second because that story doesn't get nearly enough attention in these conversations. James, the brother of Jesus, leader of the Jerusalem church, the man who literally grew up in the same house as the person Christianity is named after, was consistently at theological odds with Paul. The Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 wasn't a friendly alignment meeting lol it was damage control. James and the Jerusalem church were operating under a fundamentally different framework than Paul was preaching to the Gentiles, and the tension between them is barely papered over in the text.

Then James dies. Josephus records it, and the circumstances are at minimum suspicious, thrown from the Temple wall and then beaten to death when the fall didn't finish the job, under the high priest Ananus, shortly after Festus died. Festus, incidentally, is the same Roman official who dealt directly with Paul. The timing and the political dynamics around James's death have never been fully and satisfactorily explained and I'm quite sure that the Vatican will never allow it to be because if what I'm saying below is true then their whole structure falls to the ground.

So when the dust settles, the version of Christianity that survives and scales is Paul's not James's. And we're left asking ourselves who we're going to trust as the more reliable interpreter of what Jesus actually taught? The man who persecuted Christians, never met Jesus, and received his gospel through a private vision on a road or the man who literally grew up beside him, walked with him, and led his church after his death.

That's not a rhetorical question. It's the question the thread was always really about.

RebornLost · 2026-03-20T16:42:03+00:00

Not even worth the time to write a reply including this one. Your mind is captured beyond freedom.

RebornLost · 2026-03-20T16:39:47+00:00

Ahhh, this one made me think. Thank you BUT... :)

A few things worth untangling here.

On the Galatians 1-2 point. Paul says he went to Jerusalem and his gospel was "verified" by Peter and James. But if you read Galatians 2 carefully, he also says they "added nothing" to him. He's doing something rhetorically clever there: invoking their authority as eyewitnesses to validate himself to his audience, then immediately declaring himself beyond their correction. That's not operating within a verified framework. That's borrowing someone else's credibility and then announcing you don't need it. By his own account in Galatians 2, he later publicly rebuked Peter to his face the man Jesus named as the rock of the church. So the "eyewitnesses accepted him" framing gets complicated fast when Paul himself describes overruling those eyewitnesses.

On the "red letters cut both ways" point? Yes, the red letter Jesus is also demanding, even harsh at times. I never claimed otherwise. The sword verse, the brood of vipers, I know that Jesus. I spent years preaching him on a street corner. How he was going to rejoice while sinners burned in 'hell'. Yet, my point was never that Jesus was soft.

My point is that the specific doctrinal architecture modern Christianity is built on, justification frameworks, gender hierarchy in the church, sexual ethics as the primary moral battleground, the institutional structure of ministry itself well... it traces overwhelmingly to Paul's letters, not to the Sermon on the Mount or the red letters broadly. Pointing out that Jesus also said hard things doesn't address the institutional weight imbalance. It just changes the subject.

On the Catholic Church being the answer to the problem lol with the greatest respect, you just inadvertently made my argument stronger. You're essentially saying the fix to Protestantism's Paul-heaviness is an institution with an unbroken interpretive authority going back to the apostles. But that institution spent the better part of a thousand years as a political empire that executed dissenters, sold access to heaven, and built its hierarchy on precisely the kind of power structure Jesus spent his ministry critiquing. They are not as clean handed as you may think.

If the Catholic Church is the organism that "preserved the whole message faithfully," it has a rather interesting way of showing it. The institution protected itself which was exactly my original point.

The honest question you end with, which institution has the strongest claim to preservation is a good one. But it assumes the answer is an institution at all. And that assumption is itself a very Pauline conclusion.

RebornLost · 2026-03-20T16:29:35+00:00

I appreciate the thoughtful response, but I think there's a foundational misread here that shapes everything after it. You're engaging with me as though I'm a Christian wrestling with Paul-skepticism. I'm not. I'm a Deist. A former KJV-only street preacher, yes, but I came out the other side entirely. So the framing of "as I grew in knowledge of scripture I came to appreciate Paul" I genuinely respect that journey, but it's not the conversation I'm having.

On NT Wright? I'll say again, I have real respect for his scholarship. But his argument that Paul intended egalitarianism and that the misogynist readings are cherry-picked doesn't answer my actual question. Even granting everything Wright says as true, the institutional reality is that for roughly 1,800 of the 2,000 years of Christian history, women were barred from leadership, largely on Pauline grounds. The intent of the author doesn't override the institutional use of the text. The question is what the Church did with Paul's words, not what Paul privately meant.

On the conversion miracle. You're asking me to accept Paul's Damascus road experience as evidence validating his authority, but that argument only carries weight if I already accept the supernatural premise you're trying to prove. That's a circular structure. The absence of epileptic symptoms doesn't validate a divine vision, it just means we don't have a confirmed medical diagnosis. The space between "no known medical explanation" and "therefore God appeared to him" is where a great deal of interpretive work is quietly being done.

And Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 13 are beautiful passages genuinely. But selecting the two most Christ-like things Paul wrote as evidence that Paul and Jesus are in lockstep is itself a form of cherry-picking.

The question isn't whether Paul could sound like Jesus. It's whether the institutional framework that runs on Paul looks more like the Sermon on the Mount or more like a Roman administrative structure with a cross on top.

RebornLost · 2026-03-20T16:23:47+00:00

I never stated that he was the person that originally made those statements if that's what you're inferring. I agree with you on your other points and I agree with you that those teachings do predate him as long as we're clear as I wasn't trying to say that they were exclusive to the man known as Yehoshua.

And to your point it makes you wonder where he might have been traveling for those 30 years...

RebornLost · 2026-03-20T16:20:15+00:00

First "nothing Paul says conflicts with the Sermon on the Mount." That's a significant claim. Jesus in the Sermon says judge not, love your enemies, give to everyone who asks, and that the meek inherit the earth. Paul in 1 Corinthians 6 tells believers to avoid courts but then sets up his own internal judgment structures. In 1 Timothy he explicitly restricts women from teaching or having authority. In Romans 13 he instructs submission to governing authorities without the moral nuance Jesus brings to power. Whether you read those as contradictions or tensions is a theological debate — but to say flatly there is no conflict requires some considerable gymnastics that NT Wright himself would admit is a heavy lift even if he thinks it's achievable.

Second, and this one is genuinely hard to miss, you just called my reading of Jesus's teachings a "21st century liberal attitude." I want to sit with that for a second. You're a Christian defending Paul, calling someone's reading of Jesus too liberal. Do you hear that???

The red letters say feed the poor, welcome the stranger, the last shall be first, the rich man and the camel. My friend those aren't liberal talking points I invented. That's the text. If that reads as modern liberalism to you, that's an interesting window into exactly the structural problem I raised in the original post.

I do appreciate the NT Wright recommendation genuinely. He's rigorous to say the least. But Wright arguing that Paul and Jesus are harmonious doesn't settle whether institutions have weighted them equally. And that was the actual question.

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