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SOLVING THE JESUS-PAUL PROBLEM...CAN IT BE DONE?

The traditional Christian view of Scripture as a book that speaks with one voice - God's voice - has been vigorously challenged in recent years. Scripture speaks with many voices, it is said - many different human voices, saying significantly different things. The diversity is such that, in the view of many, we cannot speak of the theology of the Bible, or even of the theology of the NT, since there are different, even contradictory, theologies in the two Testaments. Whether we can continue to speak of the unity of Scripture or even to regard the Bible as the inspired word of God is debated among scholars, with most agreeing that old definitions of the unity and inspiration of the Bible need to be replaced. The Jesus-Paul issue is a useful test-case, since there is prima facie evidence of significant diversity here. The evidence needs to be weighed before we can determine if, in the New Testament, we have a contradiction or simply divergence and development of the same idea. One you see the evidence for yourself I think you will see that the answer is without a doubt "counteraction" and not theological evolution of the same idea.

PROBLEMS THAT MUST BE DEALT WITH IN SOLVING THE JESUS-PAUL QUESTION: CAN IT BE DONE?

The wide divergence of opinion among scholars about Paul's relationship to Jesus makes it clear that the Jesus-Paul question is complex, to say the least. It is complex for a large number of reasons. What never ceases to amaze me is that many Christians who write about Jesus and Paul are totally unaware of the following problems; for if they had possessed such knowledge they would not be writing what they are.

PROBLEMS

First, there is considerable scholarly confusion about what, if anything, we can know about the historical Jesus. In Christianity today we have a paradox of sorts:
- We have Christian scholars who want the truth and study to find it and report it in an unbiased manner irrespective of their personal religious beliefs.
- On the other hand we have the "denominational driven" pursuit of the "statue quo" where not matter what my be discovered or uncovered that might shed light upon the now existing "orthodoxy of Christianity" in such a light to expose some or much of it to be error is dismissed and not handled in an honest fashion in order to do no harm to the existing Christian orthodoxy.

The facts are that the Gospels and the Epistles records and purports to tell us things, but how reliable these are historically is uncertain. When one examines all the evidence both inside and outside Christian circles for the authorship, origin, authenticity, and integrity for such documents one does not come away from such an experience with any faith left in the hope and belief that such documents were written by Jews, that they were written by the followers of the Jewish Christ, or that the Holy Spirit had anything to do with them in the first place. In fact such ruthless inspection and evaluation of these documents, both internally and externally, prove their Gentile authorship and at a rather late date long after the death of the last apostle. Such uncertainty obviously makes any study of Paul's relationship to Jesus difficult.

answer for yourself: Why is that knowledge and facts so deadly to the Christian position that it must be hidden and kept from you by orthodoxy Christianity?

Simply because, among other things, that, if there does seem to be a connection between a story or saying of Jesus found in the Gospels and a Pauline saying, the dependence need not necessarily be from Jesus to Paul, but could be from Paul to the Jesus of the Gospels. Since the Gospels are usually thought to have been written after Paul's letters, it could well be that that these Gentile evangelists have been influenced by Paul or Pauline tradition in their portrayal of Jesus.

Goulder argues for extensive use of Pauline tradition by both Matthew and Luke (Goulder, Midrash and Lection, 153-170; The Evangelists' Calendar, 227-240; Luke: A New Paradigm, 129-146). Other scholars recognize occasional direct or indirect borrowing

That means the Gospels are a continuance of Pauline ideology and theology written in the names of the apostles of Jesus in order to make it look as if Paul's gospel (my gospel) was really the message of the earliest Jewish church as well. This is simply "back-writing" ideas into the past that never were held by those who followed the living Jesus, let alone Jesus himself. Such literary creationism is simply a lying agenda to promote the beliefs of a later group which held different beliefs from that of their earlier counterparts.

Scholars disagree not only on what goes back to Jesus, but also on the interpretation of much of the teaching given by Jesus in the Gospels. Even such a central theme as 'the kingdom of God' is understood quite differently by different scholars. Again this complicates the study of Paul's relationship to Jesus.

The uncertainty is not only at Jesus' end of the equation, but also at Paul's, since scholars disagree as to which of the NT letters attributed to Paul actually go back to the apostle. The NT ascribes thirteen letters to Paul, but six of them "Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus" are regarded as pseudonymous by some scholars.

Scholars also disagree about the interpretation of Paul's theology. Most of our lives we have heard the preachings so we are pretty much familiar with the Church's tradition concerning Paul and his message. However there again is a whole other side of this coin where the very ideas both held and taught by Paul can be shown to stem completely out of Gentile pagan mystery religions which find their origin in sun-worship. These ideas are normally totally foreign to the normal Christian and even many Christian writers but when one sees how "exact quotes" as taken from pagan rituals and liturgies, let alone their theological dogmas, has been lifted out of gentile paganism and now finds it's way into the writings of Paul as he pictures Jesus in such ways. One you see this for yourself then there is little room to doubt Paul's borrowing of such pagan Gentile ideas in the selling of a Jewish Rabbi-redeemer to the Gentiles. The Jesus of Paul is made to look like and have more in common with the non-Jews' pagan religions of antiquity than Biblical Judaism.

We are confronted with religious documents that both the Jewish people and the Christians love and cherish as their "books of authority." The problem is these books contradict each other in major religious and "messianic" positions. Each group claims authority for their writings and blames the other for corrupting the truth. We are left with the Jewish Tanakh (the Jewish Old Testament Scriptures) that reads completely different in key passages when compared with the Christian's Old Testament. Up until 1950 with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls most Christians maintained that the Jews had altered their Jewish Masoretic text to write out any and all references to Jesus. In other words the Jews were blamed with "de-Jesusizing" Jesus from their texts in response to the Christian mission. This argument could not be disproved by the Jews, besides the Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures predated the oldest existing Jewish Scriptures by almost 1000 years. On the surface it seem that the older Septuagint (Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures) were to be accepted as the more correct since they were the oldest surviving copy of the Old Testament in existence in 1950. The Jews were defenseless again such logic from the Christian camps since the Christians had the highly revered LXX as supposedly taken from the Jewish Scriptures in a "miracle" translation. Passages in the Christian's Old Testament that read like the prophecy of a godman were only later quoted and applied to Jesus in the New Testament. On the surface it looked like a "lock;" that the Old Testament in the Christian Bible (thought to be a faithful and older translation of the Jewish Scriptures) had been prophesying about Jesus all along. When one consulted the Jewish Bibles in these particular passages one found that they were worded in no similar way and to the uneducated in manuscript evidences it would seem as if the Jew's were guilty of changing their Bibles to remove any references that could possibly be applied to Jesus. But when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered along with the secular writings were found which also included both copies of the Greek LXX and the Jewish Masoretic texts (which read different in these key places). What concerns us is that when these Jewish Masoretic texts which were discovered at Qumran were shown to be as old or older than the Greek translation of them were compared with the existing Jewish Masoretic texts of 900-1000 A.D. (the ones thought altered in response to Christianity) they were found to be 99.9% identical! This has a staggering impact upon all Biblical studies done in the last 2000 years. What this teaches us is that the Jews NEVER altered their Jewish texts in ways thought; rather, the Jewish Masoretic texts are older than the Greek texts found at Qumran and show that prior to the translation of the Jewish Scriptures into Greek that they read completely different than the way that they will come out when translated into the Greek by the Essenes of Alexandria. Let me say it another way. The Messianic passages in the Jewish Masoretic text found at Qumran read not like those of the Greek translation of them. The Greek translators altered them on purpose for some reason. That reason is not hard to discern when you study who the Essenes really were and what they really believed (http://bennoah1.freewebsites.com). What one finds is that the Essenes of Alexandria, Egypt, in 200 B.C.E., were Hellenized to such an extent that they had move away from normative Judaism and had begun to incorporate into their practice of the faith of Moses ideas from Egyptian sun-worship where sun-godmen who died and raised were looked upon as saviors. All you had to do was partake of the supper of the godman and then "you were in Osiris/Jesus). In the theological milieu that existed in this metropolis which had the distinction of having the world's largest library and Essene University the Essenes sought to solidify their influence by obtaining a book from God as had other Jews and this new "Greek translation," which was of their own doing, will give then Divine authority over all who denied or debated their religious positions. The impact of this cannot fully be realized until you understand that EVERY quote in the New Testament and EVERY quote concerning Jesus in the New Testament is taken from the corrupted Old Testament that finds its origin in the corrupted Greek translations of the Jewish Masoretic Text. That means that every quote applied to Jesus in the New Testament finds, most likely, its genesis and origin in solar and astral worship and not in Moses, the Prophets, or the Writings (at least until they were altered). Ultimately this means that as a Christian the Jesus that you have been taught and told to trust in for Eternal Life is little more than a solar godman of the sun-worshippers of the nations. It was to these people the Jews were called by YHWH to reach with the true message of God who is ONE and not THREE and to whom Ethical Monotheism was to be taught. Instead the Gentile nations have changed little; they still have their pagan trinities. The only difference is that we have made it look as if God has given them to us . We end up believing lies and do great injustice to the real Jesus by spreading such lies in his name. Such is gross idolatry and 2.5 billion people on the planet don't know because they were never told and they never studied it out for themselves. But trust me on this: God knows!

Lastly, since we have a forged religious document which we trust, then when reading it we are not trained to discern what is true from the false when reading the Old Testament and the New Testament. Not everything in the Christian Old Testament and the New Testament is wrong! Not everything is wrong! But many things are and these things need to be revealed and taught to the Christians of the world in hopes that they can learn and repent when wrong. When we approach Paul of the New Testament we must understand that he did not write everything that has his name attached; but even that being so, there is enough that he did write that provides for us severe problems. You might say where there is smoke there is fire. When one can read the New Testament and hold in limbo the various teachings of Paul one is struck with the lack of unity or harmony between the things he taught or were attributed to him. If one believes Paul held such beliefs then he changed during his life. If one spends any time at all in comparative religious studies one sees that most of the stories applied to Jesus, by the gospel writers and even by Paul himself, find their origin in the exploits and lives of the sun-gods of Gentile nations.

So we end up today with the Essene's corruption of the Jewish Old Testament (the Greek translation) which is full of prophecies of this coming sun-godman who will die only to be raised and ascend to heaven (Osiris) and who provides salvation for only his followers if they "believe" in him and share his "eucharist." It can be shown why and where the Essenes went for such "religious ideas" but it was not from the Torah, Prophets, and Writings. Later these same Essene oriented apocalyptics will write their rendition of the end of the world and these writings and ideas will make their way into Jewish theology, but all this happens at a much later day and coincides with the Jewish defeatism that accompanied their slaughter at the hands of Antiochus Epipanies.

Opposing this Old Testament lies the Jewish Masoretic text where, in repudiation of this Greek corrupted translation, we find the Jewish Bible with prophecies of a human deliverer anointed of God who will be surrendered to God and used by God to deliver and bring salvation to the world through the words of his mouth and through the teaching of the Torah to the whole world.

SO...WHICH IS RIGHT WHEN COMING TO TERMS WITH THE JESUS-PAUL PROBLEM? WELL...IT DEPENDS ON WHICH BIBLE YOU USE FOR YOUR AUTHORITY

The good news is that there is an answer to the above problem but it entails a lot of hard study and reading in order to come to the understanding of the dynamics involved in the changing of the Jewish Masoretic text in the first place. The fact is simply this: The older Jewish Masoretic Texts have been changed in the translation of the Greek translation by the Essenes of Alexandria, Egypt. It is up to us to find our why they did it and what the repercussions of this is, not only for them then, but for the emerging Messianic movement in the first century let alone today. We have those answers:

And even if all of these difficulties can be overcome and a probable connection discovered between, for example, a saying of Jesus and a Statement of Paul, this does not necessarily prove that Paul knew or was consciously drawing on the sayings of Jesus.

So we are left at present with the still troubling question to be dealt with in the next articles: Was Paul a follower of some historical Jesus in any direct sense, or was his theology rooted rather in the teaching of the early Hellenistic Christian community?

This must be explored and we do so in the forth coming articles on this website.

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