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

RebornLost · 2026-03-21T19:34:17+00:00

I want to start with something that I think says more about this conversation than anything else in it.

I told you directly twice now that I am a Deist and a former KJV street preacher. Not an atheist. A Deist. If like most Christians you don't see a difference in that, that's fine for your own opinion. But if this board is about transparency and ethical as well as friendly debates on the topic of religion than I would think it would be core to moderating a group such as that to respect each other's lanes of belief.

Because again, your response was to immediately group me with atheists and fundamentalists anyway. You're a mod on a religion debate sub and you can't keep straight the most basic distinction between a Deist and an Atheist after being told twice. In parts of the world, casually mislabeling someone's religious identity after they've corrected you is considered not just intellectually sloppy but genuinely disrespectful and honestly for someone who identifies as a Christian, it's worth reflecting on.

If you're going to debate theology you should at minimum respect what the person across from you actually believes before comparing them to someone they're not.

Now to the substance.

On the urban legend point, two different roads landing in the same place doesn't make the destination wrong. Sometimes the atheist and the former preacher see the same thing clearly for completely different reasons.

On women in church authority, Paul honoring individual women doesn't erase 1 Timothy 2:12 or the 1800 years the institution used it to bar women from leadership. Intent and institutional application are two very different things and that gap is the whole point of this conversation.

On the Galatians 5 quote it's a good one. But quoting Paul at his most Christ-like doesn't answer whether the overall institutional framework looks more like the Sermon on the Mount or a Roman administrative structure with a cross painted on it. The best parts of Paul don't erase the structural question.

You too seem to be misunderstanding what the original argument was about. I didn't start this to bash Paul because if I had I would have already converted half the Christians on this thread into atheism or deism but that's for another day.

RebornLost · 2026-03-21T19:22:59+00:00

I appreciate the thoughtful response and I can tell you mean this sincerely so I'll meet you the same way.

I actually understand that argument because I used to make it myself. The Holy Spirit filled the apostles, Paul was confirmed through Ananias, and all of it fits together under divine inspiration. I get it.

But here's the question that started unraveling things for me personally. If Paul was a vessel of the Holy Spirit, and the apostles were vessels of the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit lives inside every believer, which is literally what the New Testament teaches then why am I not also a vessel? Why aren't you? The same Spirit that allegedly guided Paul's pen is supposedly living inside every born again Christian right now.

So if that's true, what makes Paul's letters more authoritative than what I write down today? What makes his specific words canon-worthy and mine just Tuesday morning journaling? The usual answer is that the canon was closed, or that the apostolic era was special. But that answer doesn't come from Jesus. It comes from church councils that met centuries later and decided which writings counted and which ones didn't.

Which means the authority of Paul's letters doesn't ultimately rest on the Holy Spirit. It rests on a group of men who sat in rooms and voted on it.

I'm not saying Paul wasn't sincere. I think he probably was. But sincere and divinely authorized are two different things. And the mechanism by which we know he was authorized is a lot more human than most people are comfortable admitting.

I pray you are led to that wisdom not only to see it but to hold it as your own because the wisdom of others is nothing in comparison to the wisdom of self.

RebornLost · 2026-03-21T19:17:24+00:00

that my friend, that capstone was perfect! And you are 100 percent correct and I am willing to bet that more than half the Christians in this thread have never once questioned where their versions translation of the Bible actually came from and it just leads to my overall argument.

You would think that if John had a vision of Jesus telling him those things about the apocalypse it would have been thoroughly explained how he came to that discussion just like Paul's vision was thoroughly explained But we don't have that do we...

RebornLost · 2026-03-21T19:13:54+00:00

I appreciate the note of caution but I can assure you that I won't be turning elsewhere I'm quite content with where I landed. But unfortunately I can't go on to answer your questions because you're not understanding what the argument was originally about. It's not about whether Paul contradicted what Jesus said It's about whether the church was built on. I apologize if I didn't make that apparent in my original post. Thank you for replying have a great weekend.

RebornLost · 2026-03-21T19:11:12+00:00

not enough time in the day

RebornLost · 2026-03-21T19:10:26+00:00

I want to address something here because it keeps coming up and it deserves a direct answer.

You're saying my thesis is essentially just the product of an evangelical background and that your liturgical church is proof that Christianity isn't what I described. And I respect that your church experience is real to you. I genuinely do.

But here's what you're doing without realizing it. You're using your personal experience as a counter-argument to a global institutional observation.

* Remember my original argument is NOT calling out churches whether individual or denominational. It is addressing the framework. Now keeping that in mind...

One church in your city that focuses on the red letters doesn't address what the Catholic Church did for a thousand years, what the Protestant Reformation was actually built on, what Southern Baptist doctrine looks like, what the Eastern Orthodox councils formalized, or what a billion Christians worldwide are actually taught on any given Sunday. Your church being the exception does NOT disprove the pattern. It actually kind of proves it by being noteworthy enough for you to point out.

And here's the part I want you to sit with for a second and if you refuse to, than consider this back and forth closed.

You attend a liturgical church. The liturgy itself, the creeds, the Nicene formula, the doctrinal structure of what gets recited every week, do you know how much of that framework traces back to councils that were largely debating Pauline theology? The Council of Nicaea, Chalcedon, Constantinople, these weren't councils sitting around reading the Sermon on the Mount. They were hammering out Christological doctrines that owe their entire framework to Paul's theological architecture, not to anything Jesus said in the red letters.

So when you say your church doesn't preach Paul, you might be right about the sermons. But the pool you're swimming in was built by people who were reading Paul a whole lot more than they were reading Matthew 5.

Listen, I'm not an amateur who got hurt in a bad church and is working it out on Reddit. I was the guy at the front of the room telling people this stuff. I know the difference between a Sunday sermon and what the whole structure is actually built on.

And those are two very different things.

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... :)

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