Paul, along with Peter, James and John, was in receipt of an authentic Christian gnosis - and one might say that Paul gave it an expression above the bounds of time and space, and a foundation in the 'here and now' of individual personal being.
It was Paul who founded the idea of Christianity not fixed in geographical place, nor the provenance of one particular people, nor simply the remembrance of a dead prophet.
That Paul has so many enemies has a number of reasons, not the least of which is not everyone can 'see' what he is saying - gnosis is, by its very nature, not immediately apparent.
Nor is it easy. Nor is it comfortable. Nor can we have it on our terms.
People enjoy the message, but they don't enjoy the medicine. St Paul's epistles are primarily medicinal. One might not enjoy his solutions, and the taste might sometimes be tart, but his reasoning is beyond fault.
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At certain times Christ called Peter, James and John apart from the others. The turning moments of his ministry was witnessed by these three. We have no written record of James; Peter, tradition holds, is the source of the Gospel of Mark, was primarily concerned with the sudden and unexpected irruption of the Divine into the mundane, and according to the gospel, Peter was very mundane indeed.
Christ spoke to Paul directly, and often. Certainly Paul knew, from the very outset, things which came as such a surprise to the Apsotles that they argued he was wrong, not the least being the Gospel was for the whole world, not just the Jews.
If we do away with Paul, we must likewise do away with Acts, and with the Gospel of Luke, who was Paul's disciple and companion, and which was regarded by Early Christianity as an accurate and inarguable account. Where the gospels differed, St Luke held sway.
So if we do away with Paul, and the Pauline sources, we strip away from Christianity its most profoundly mystical and mysterious elements - leaving us with the Old Testament, Matthew and John, and the Apocalypse. Well, discount Matthew, what can a despised tax collector, a collaborator with the enemy, have to offer orthodox Judaism?
So John, then.
As a mystical text the Johannine Gospel is too pure, too fragile to stand alone. It might have become a disputed text within a secret canon of a Jewish esoterism, validated by the Prologue's reference to Genesis, but little more. Its miracles would have been taught as symbol and allegory, but not a reality, the Incarnation being denied by orthodoxy. Today, if anyone had heard of Christ they would have been required to do some serious digging. Judaism is hardly likely to champion the man they crucified as a blasphemer.
Within three hundred years of Golgotha, Christianity would have vanished from the face of the earth as an effective spiritual means.
Some elements of the Johannine Gospel might have in time been assimilated into an already declining Hellenic mysticism, but if we consider the prevalance of error, especially today when people assume the right to interpret scripture as however they so desire, then its hardly likely that the least fragment of Scripture would have survived in any recognisable form. Certainly the mystical flights of Orphism, Platonism and the like were soon being undermined by the secular and empirical juggernaut of Aristoleanism.
Any trace of the man who was called 'Jesus Christ' - and the spiritual dimension - would be more of a puzzle than the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The Johannine Epistles, for example, with their idealistic message of 'love one another' would be translated (as the ideal was then in some areas, as it was again notably in the 60s) as 'shag anything that moves.'
And we would all, of course, be Muslim.
The 'problem' is not with St Paul (nor with the Emperor Constantine) but what happens when a 'simple' message becomes the 'state' message, because people always view the state (your neighbour) as limiting one's personal freedom, forgetting that they are the state, and should expect to be bound by the same rules they expect others to be bound by.
Christ founded an 'ekklesia' (translated as church), a 'people called forth' (the meaning of ekklesia), not an individual way, but a way of individuals in harmony, and Paul always and only sought to rectify the personal impulse (his own being to hunt down and kill those who saw other than he, until Jesus asked him "why dost thou persecute me?") to a calling most difficult and most demanding (of self) - the Way of the Divine.
If he seems 'bloody minded' in his pursuit of this ideal, it was because in his faith he could settle and looked for nothing but the best, of himself and others. Remember his audience - he preached to the dockers and hookers, the thief and the vagabond, as well as the good and the saintly.
Sometimes, like Jesus Christ himself, you have to be blunt to get the message across - and where Paul seems uncompromising, Christ was ruthless.
The Pauline Medicine is to forget our 'suffering' and think of 'Him that is Unthinkable'.
The Pauline Message is that He chooses to forget His own suffering (at our hands), and think the unthinkable - us.
Thomas
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