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XXXI - Concerning the Manichæanism of Paul
Nº. XXX
CONCERNING PAUL AND THE DISCIPLES OF JESUS (2)
IN a vision which was given to me last
night, it was represented to me that the common view of Paul’s character and
position with regard to the primitive Church is a totally false one; and the
persons who made the communication which I am about to relate, appeared to me to
have been personally acquainted with Paul, and to be thoroughly familiar with
the events occurring at the time of his apostleship. They told me, with evident
indignation, that the Christian Church of to-day entirely misunderstands the
relationship really existing between the apostles whom Christ had instructed and
elected as his
missionaries, and the converted Hebrew sacerdotalist. “It is amazing,” they said, “that
your Church can read in the writings extant concerning our relations with
Paul the account of the mistrust, suspicion, and disfavour with which we always
regarded him, and not see that he was never one with us. The very leader and
chief of our circle withstood him to the face again and again, as though he had
been an enemy of the Church; and on one occasion he was forced to fly from the
brethren by night and by stratagem, so great and so bitter was the indignation
his view of the faith aroused among us who had been the Lord’s friends, and who
knew the truth as Paul never saw it. For he imported into that pure and simple
rule of life a mass of Levitical and Rabbinical usages and beliefs which we had
shaken from us as the dust from our feet. He sunk the realities of the Gospel of
Jesus under an overwhelming weight of hard sayings and sacerdotal
misrepresentations. He, who had never known the Master as he was, took upon
himself to distort his image into that of a strange God whom we had not known.
Nor could we recognise in his garbled version of the beautiful and willing
martyrdom of the man whom we had so dearly loved, a single trait of his
character, or the least resemblance to the doctrine he had taught us. What we
had seen and known as the pure and perfect love of a ready death, bravely borne for conscience’ sake, Paul presented to us in a
new and unlovely guise as the sacrifice of a victim to appease the anger of the
God whom Jesus called his Father and ours. Out of that which had been for us a
simple rule of life, a simple purging of the old faith, Paul erected the strange
and elaborate system which is called ‘the scheme of the Atonement.’
For us and our Master there had been no ‘scheme’; God was reconciled to man by
love, and not by sacrifice. But Paul would have a ‘new religion,’ (1) and a creed hard to understand;
and he left to the world a Christianity of his own which we knew not, but which
is yours to-day. And in this he did us greater evil and detriment than if he had
persecuted and slain us all physically. For by his false conversion he deceived
the world and drowned the truth by a flood of strange doctrines. For this we
were all against him, and never acknowledged his apostleship, being persuaded
that he knew not Christ nor the faith which Christ taught. Had he
been content with the truth, we would never have set
our faces against him; for he had many gifts, among which his eloquence was not
the least. But through his fatal perversion of the faith, and through his fatal
love of metaphysical doctrines and of Rabbinical subtleties, he falsified that
which was the glory of the Church, and brought into the world the monstrous
doctrines of the ‘Christianity’ which is preached in your churches to-day.”
I was further told, that on the night
before Paul’s escape in the basket let down from the wall of Damascus, a violent
altercation had taken place between him and the brethren, in the course of which
Paul had maintained that the only chance for the final triumph of the Gospel lay
in its erection into a system, and one that must of necessity be sacrificial.
They then challenged him upon the point, but he insisted that he saw further
into the matter than they did, and that his special mission lay in the
elaboration of the plan he had conceived with regard to Christ’s position as a
mediator between God and man.
[The vision was entirely spontaneous
and unexpected. I had not previously given any attention to the subject; nor was
I aware that a similar instruction had some time previously been given to my
colleague.
The personages I beheld in my vision
bore no resemblance to any of the numerous representations of the apostles made
by painters, but I was far from being in a sufficiently lucid condition to
obtain an impression of their appearance so vivid and
distinct as to enable me, as usually is the case, to make a drawing of them.
Neither have I been able, with anything like my accustomed accuracy, to
reproduce their words. The tone and substance, however, are faithfully rendered.
The tone throughout was that of strong indignation, mingled with regret, against
Paul; and of scorn at the folly of Christendom in accepting so gross and
palpable a perversion of the teaching of Jesus and nature of God as that
involved in the sacerdotal doctrine of vicarious atonement.] (1)
Footnotes
(77:2)
(78:1) The
“new religion,” in this context, “implies the departures made by Paul from the
teaching of the original disciples” (Letter of E.M. to Light,
1889, p. 507). S.H.H.
(79:1) 2 Peter iii, 15, 16 (an
epistle of exceedingly doubtful authority), evidently represents a desire either
to compose or to ignore this feud by treating the difference as more apparent
than real. E.M.
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