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corpus-paul - Re: Why were Gentiles attracted to Christianity?

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  • From: "Eric Zuesse" <cettel AT shoreham.net>
  • To: "Corpus-paul" <corpus-paul AT franklin.metalab.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Why were Gentiles attracted to Christianity?
  • Date: Thu, 6 Jun 2002 12:51:40 -0400


David,

Re. your:

" I doubt seriously that Paul was thinking so far
down the line as that one day he'd convince a Roman emperor
of the truth of his mystery religion. Actually, in my mind,
Paul did not create the mystery religion-like Christ dogma.
His mission was to promote the equality of Gentiles who
believed in God's promises to Abraham and *observant* Jews
who also had this faith. He knew nothing of Jesus. The
Christ dogma in his epistles was added later as an attempt
by a Gentile oriented Jesus faction to attract Gentile
associates of Judaism. It was this Gentile oriented Jesus
faction that had synthesized the savior Christ dogma out of
Jewish apocalyptic messianism and Hellenistic-oriental
salvation myths engendered by middle-Platonic musings."

Of course, there is a great deal that has been writtten on the mystery
cults, etc., and paganism's impacts upon Christian dogmas. Some of this
literature, such as Freke/Gandy, Acharya S, and Earl Doherty, deny that
there was any historical Jesus. To me, that shows how little pagan mythology
actually explains about such important things as Christianity's
anti-Semitism (1 Thes. 2:15-16, John 8:44 and 19:16-18, Mat. 23:31-38 and
27:25, Luke 19:27, etc.), and even some purely ritualistic things, such as
the replacement of circumcision by baptism. In other words, I just don't
feel that that line of "pagan vs. Jewish mythology" thinking gets one very
far in understanding either the substantive or even the purely ritualistic
issues that have been important in subsequent Christian history.

Furthermore, I feel that that line of thinking downplays Christianity's
authentic Jewish roots. This is obviously the case. But it also downplays
its authentic specifically *Roman* roots, and the impact upon Christianity
of the Emperor and the entire Roman polity, which formed the basis for the
papacy.

I believe strongly that Christianity, if understood outside of the context
of the war between the Jews and the Romans, is Christianity understood
outside of any really historically meaningful and truthful context at all.

To me, the biggest mystery to explain about Christianity is how it came to
be that it was supposedly founded by Jesus who was crucified by the Roman
regime, whereas it was headquartered in Rome where the regime that crucified
Jesus was headquartered, and was not headquartered in Jerusalem where Jesus
and his successor James had had their headquarters. The mere assumption that
the Jerusalem group--Jesus, James, and their followers--were "the church" at
its beginnings, just smells bad, very bad. I agree with Hyam that Paul
invented Christianity. However, I am not looking forward to getting
side-tracked into such issues as whether or not Paul was really a Pharisee,
or whether perhaps Jesus and/or James were. Internecine conflicts within
First Century Judaism seem to me not to be nearly as central to Christianity
as was the conflict between the Jews themselves and the Romans.

Furthermore, I believe that a great deal has to be explained about Peter's
obviously mythological dominance of the sect after Jesus, versus James'
actual dominance of it. One might challenge Robert Eisenman on whether this
or that document really refers to James, or what it does refer to, etc., but
I believe that Galatians 2:12 and Acts 15:13-21 stand like smoking guns as
testimony to the fraudulence of such central Christian passages as Matthew
16:18. Of course, such fraudulent passages are widely accepted as being
fraudulent, but the real questions that their fraudulence pose are ignored,
such as how and why did they get there to begin with?

The idea of Peter as the first Bishop of Rome, and from that the first Pope,
is just so obviously tied in with Rome's victory over the Jews, not so much
because Peter was actually ever in Rome, much less its bishop (and he wasn't
even named at all among the two-dozen named members of that congregation in
Romans 16), but because Peter was Paul's own predecessor in the mission to
the Gentiles, while James, the authentic leader of the sect, wasn't and was
instead Paul's actual enemy from about 50 CE (immediately after the council
in Jerusalem, Gal. 2:11-16) onwards.

So I am not at all impressed by theories of Christian origins that
side-track away from the Jewish-versus-Roman conflict that was obviously at
the heart of how and why Christianity came to be the way it is.

I've spoken in some of my postings about the core methodological issue of
the unacceptability of citing secondary literature as being "evidence" on
what Paul meant. I feel that only by means of violating such basic
legal/forensic rules of evidence has the discussion of Paul, and of Jesus
and of all the rest of Christian origins, been able to continue for so many
hundreds of years after Baur with Peter still being referred to seriously as
having been the leader after Jesus. Galatians is legal/forensically the
highest quality evidence that exists on that question, and in 2:11-12 it
conclusively proves that when James said "Jump!" Peter wanted only to know
"How high?" Acts forensically isn't nearly as high quality evidence, but in
a court of law, lower-ranked evidence can still be cited to confirm a theory
that's itself derived from best evidence. And Acts 15:13-21 certainly does
that.

In my book, I am presenting what I believe to be a thoroughly documented
case that the first pope wasn't appointed until some time between 116-144
CE, in a secret conclave of Bishops, a coonclave called probably to deal
with the rising problem of heresies within what by that time was clearly
already the *Roman* Church. Getting from Jesus' crucifixion by Romans, to
James' leadership of Jesus' followers isn't hard at all. But getting from
there to the papacy in Rome, is another matter entirely, and yet the
mysteries begin to evaporate if you see Paul as the founder, and his war
against the Jews as being part of Rome's own.

I just don't find constructive side-tracks from this into either
Pharisee-vs.-Sadducee conflicts, or Jewish-vs.-pagan mythologies, both of
which seem to me to be, essentially, distractions from what's important, not
core realities that actually shaped history in any important sense.

Best,
Eric Zuesse
cettel AT shoreham.net





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