This Christmas brought more of the same old battle over whether Jesus was the founder of Christianity. It’s 
a spurious dispute. The fact that the Apostle Paul and not Jesus was the founder of Christianity seems incontrovertible to me. Jesus died before the religion began. Yes, he sent out his disciples to spread his teachings after his death, but those teachings on love and forgiveness had nothing to do with the doctrine of sacrificial redemption upon which Paul’s Christianity is based.
In trying to put the notion to rest that Christianity actually was founded by Paul, the author of the article linked above makes arguments that miss the point. He says, “Every year, it seems, an attempt is made, usually around the Christian holidays, to debunk some aspect of Christian belief— usually involving the Virgin birth, or Jesus’ resurrection, or his relationship with women. This year features an effort to depose Jesus as the founder of the Christian church, replacing him with the apostle Paul.” I don’t see comparing the Gospel words of Jesus with the dogmas of the religion that bears his name to be an attempt to depose anyone. Rather, it is an attempt to better understand what actually happened. The author above insists that the notion that Paul and not Jesus founded Christianity “is a reheated version of an old theory that has been exhaustively debated, and basically put to rest among serious scholars of Christianity.” But then the author makes no attempt whatsoever to support this statement.
So, what does Jesus have to say about religions? First, here is his opinion of clergymen:
“Watch out for the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and be greeted in the marketplaces, and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets. They devour widows’ houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. Such men will be punished most severely.” (MK 12:38-40)
And his opinion of religious traditions:
“And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition?… You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you: ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.’” (MT 15:3-9)
“You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men… You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions.” (MK 7:8-9)
He was emphatic in telling us that we should worship God as individuals:
“When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. When you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” (MT 6:5-6)
Indeed, far from trying to establish a religion, the focus of Jesus’s Gospel ministry seems to have been upon freeing us from religious dogmas and encouraging us to approach God individually:
“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door is opened.” (LK 11:9-10)
“Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” (LK 6:46)
“If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (JN 8:31-32)
He says, “the truth will set you free.” But, from what does learning the truth set us free? Based upon what Jesus says in the Gospels, it is hard to avoid the creeping suspicion that what he actually came to do was to free us from religions altogether so we could approach God on our own.
With all of this in mind, the debate over whether or not Jesus founded Christianity seems nonsensical to me. There is no Gospel evidence beyond a couple of remarks that are likely edits that Jesus meant to start a religion. And there is plentiful Gospel evidence that his primary purpose was to enlighten us about the nature of God and the meaning and purpose of human life, so perhaps we might move beyond needing religions and learn to relate to God directly.
Of course Jesus didn’t mean to start Christianity! Obviously Christianity is actually “Paulianity”! Anyone who disputes that fact displays a lack of understanding of the Gospels and of early church history. Christianity is based on the ideas of a man who never knew Jesus in life, and who used Hebrew prophesy and first-century Hebrew sacrificial practices to establish a set of dogmas around which he could build a religion. Nothing in the Gospels suggests that Jesus thought he was a human sacrifice. Nothing suggests that he knew a God so petty and so unforgiving that such a barbaric sacrifice was necessary. The core dogmas of Christianity were Paul’s ideas. And they made sense to people at the time, back when Jews still sacrificed animals in the Temple. But why do they make sense to anybody now?
Please let me be clear. My point here is simply that Jesus doesn’t seem to have intended to found a new religion, and the religion that now bears his name doesn’t bear much relationship to what Jesus taught. Paul’s New Testament letters set forth a doctrine of sacrificial redemption that did not originate with Jesus, and that now is the core of Christianity.
I think it’s important to add here that the doctrine of sacrificial redemption has been refuted by the afterlife evidence. Scholars have found no hint in nearly two hundred years of communications from the dead that God ever has judged anyone, and nor have we found any evidence that the death of Jesus on the cross has redeemed a single human being. Instead, the afterlife evidence abundantly indicates that Jesus in the Gospels tells us things about God, reality, death, and the afterlife that we could not have 
confirmed by any means until at least the twentieth century.
So Christianity is wrong, but Jesus is right!
And had Christianity been based not in Paul’s ideas, but rather in the teachings of Jesus, its dogmas today would be so different. The least that we owe Jesus now is an open-minded re-examination in an effort to better understand his actual meaning and his message.
I am grateful to Paul. If he hadn’t packaged the teachings of Jesus in first-century Hebrew religious ideas, we would not have those teachings today. Thank you, Paul! Now perhaps it’s time to open your gift.
and we start the process of moving our bodies before we make the decision to move, which troubling fact has led many researchers to conclude that our apparent free will is an illusion. To quote a recent article in 
the real creative force is nothing like the Christian God. You will be relieved to know that we have found no evidence that such a petty and judgmental deity exists. Instead, the base creative force which is the only thing that objectively exists is both infinitely powerful and highly emotional. And the only emotion that it expresses is affinity – love – beyond our ability to comprehend it.
should know better!
a version of the scientific dogma of atheistic materialism that is softened by lofty and optimistic ideas. Human beings are alone in a clockwork universe, just the random products of evolution, but nevertheless we are unique random products. Wilson’s latest book is apparently entitled The Meaning of Human Existence, which seems to sums up his philosophy: we are random dust, true, but we are what you might call a higher class of random dust.
purpose,” since from the materialistic science point of view, human existence is an altogether random and inevitably terminal condition.
insane achievement, like the time when I was terrified of heights but still I climbed on an open staircase to the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral dome. I really loved St. Paul’s Cathedral! And who knew when I might make it back to London?
updated appendices and a wonderful Foreword by Victor Zammit, the great afterlife researcher who is one of my heroes. We have nearly 200 years of abundant and consistent communications from people we used to think were dead, and when combined with insights from quantum physics and from cutting-edge consciousness research, these communications give us a breathtaking picture of the glorious reality that we enter at death. But even beyond coming to understand death, we are learning so much more! What afterlife researchers have discovered is a whole new branch of science, a third wave of physics that is consciousness-based. We are learning things about human nature, the nature of God, and the nature of reality that are surprising and beyond-belief wonderful.
and also the many methods we have for contacting the dead proactively, including some just being developed that are going to make it impossible for anyone to still insist the dead do not survive. This book’s Foreword is by Gary E. Schwartz, Ph.D., of the University of Arizona at Tucson, who has done more than anyone else alive to prove that the dead are in communication with us.
re-recreation of Martha Jefferson’s journal. Conveniently, Thomas Jefferson’s marriage spanned the Revolutionary War, so My Thomas gives us a close perspective on the formative years of the United States from the perspective of a participant who was married to the author of the Declaration of Independence. This is one of history’s great true love stories! After Martha’s death, the evidence is strong that Thomas never married nor even loved again. He went on to become the first Secretary of State, the second Vice President, and the third President of the United States, but all of that was by his own account a consolation life. Forty years after his cherished wife’s death, Thomas Jefferson still referred to that decade of Revolutionary chaos and war as “ten years of unchequered happiness.”
core is the success of a woman from disadvantaged circumstances who by dint of pure determination builds such a successful business that she is a multimillionaire before the age of thirty. And this was back before the high-tech boom: her business delivers gourmet meals! Kim’s love story is a complicated one. There is a lot more going on than moonlight and roses. But like all my novels, this is a love story. People have been asking me to write a sequel because they want to see more of Kim Bonner’s happily ever after!
evolved to perfection. This trilogy spans almost forty years of the life of a man named by Time magazine the richest American under the age of forty when he was twenty-six. He owns Atlantica, but it is his star-crossed lover who becomes obsessed with the island, and then their son who helps us understand it. Although this trilogy tells a single story, all the Letter novels are independent of one another. They can be read in any order. 
loving, then how can so much evil exist?
stable. The process was fascinating to watch.
that other things can activate. Oddly, this seems to be true even of nonphysical fears, like social embarrassment or the loss of a job.
than like a great machine.” Physicist John Wheeler said, “A life-giving factor lies at the center of the whole machinery and design of the world.” And the great Erwin Schrodinger, winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics, said, “Multiplicity is only apparent, in truth, there is only one mind… ” “Quantum physics thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe.” Every quantum physicist with a free and creative mind must have had this notion as at least a passing thought!
torture ever devised. Then it concludes that when every aspect is considered, including the intensity and duration of the pain inflicted and the degree of psychological suffering, the very worst possible way to die is the way that most of us will die. It notes that today “the leading causes of death are heart disease and cancer, which together accounted for 63 percent of all deaths in the US in 2011. People with these and many other diseases often live longer than their ancestors, but those final increments of life are more drawn-out and painful.”
asleep as the dawn was breaking.
