PAUL INVENTED THE CORE RITE OF CHRISTIANITY?  MAYBE HE INVENTED A LOT MORE THAN THAT TOO!

SAINT SAUL WAS HE A SKELETON KEY TO THE HISTORICAL JESUS?

St Saul. This book is written by Donald Harman Akenso. It is about Saint Paul who as far as we can tell is the real founder of Christianity.

The Eucharist being the central rite of the Christian community tells us something. If it can be traced back to a non-Jesus source such as Paul then we can have little confidence in anything said about Jesus. If its origin is dubious then the gospels are eviscerated of credibility.

Paul said you cannot eat at the table of the Lord and the table of demons.

Paul taught that eating food sacrificed to demons or benign pagan gods was harmless - he wrote that he did not believe such food was anything, meaning anything that had power or significance - but it was wrong to do so in such a context that it implied you were in communion with the pagans (page 157). In other words, he denied the power of black magic for if the gods are demons they will empower the food with bad energy to draw people away from God. The Law of Moses taught clearly that supernatural powers in opposition to God did exist and could be used by people to do miracles and cast spells that work. Jesus was a whole-hearted supporter of the Law so he would have sided with it. It could be that when the gospels say Jesus was a supporter then they are lying which means they are entirely lies because Jesus’ Jewishness is the spine of everything that is said and done by Jesus in these writings. Jesus Christ warned about false signs and wonders that could deceive even the elect, the spiritual paragons of true Christianity. Jesus supposedly battled demons that threw people to the ground and made them foam at the mouth by their powers. This means that the majority of the gospel demon stories and the warnings Jesus gave about demons are lies made up after Paul’s death. When we can be sceptical about Jesus being an exorcist we can be sceptical about all the other supernatural stuff as well, and especially the resurrection. To accept Paul, is to eliminate the reliability of the gospels. They are not to be taken seriously when they contain so many lies about Jesus.

In most of the pagan lands, the temple was the abattoir, where you went to buy meat and where you went out to have a meal (page 293).

Page 203 argues that Paul contradicts the gospels that Jesus died at Passover time for he called Christ our Passover and didn’t say he died then. This would destroy the accounts of Jesus’ death making them unreliable. But it seems all Paul did was say Christ was our Passover that was sacrificed for us therefore we must keep the feast which only says he was our Passover meal and our Lamb which he could be without dying at Passover. Some would say that since he said we must keep the feast for Christ is our Passover it indicates that we must keep the feast for Christ is like a Passover Lamb and not because Christ became our Passover Lamb then. But still both could be true. He could have died at Passover and we keep the feast not because of this but because he was like a Passover Lamb. The Roman Catholic Church argues that the Passover has been replaced by the Eucharist so the Christian Passover is celebrated whenever the Eucharist is celebrated and has nothing to do with the date the Jewish Passover feast officially falls on. It is Jesus being iconically or like the Passover lamb that is the thought in Paul’s mind here.

Paul declared that before Jesus was given up he took bread and said it was his body given for his disciples and took the cup and said it was the new covenant in his blood. Jesus asked that this be done in his memory. Paul said that Jesus was crucified in weakness but lives by the power of God (2 Corinthians 13:4). His Jesus was really weak, he didn't have miracle power, so for Paul there was nothing miraculous about the Eucharist. Romanism says the Eucharist is the miracle of bread and wine turning into the body and blood of Jesus. Paul says Jesus took the bread before supper and the cup after. Why separate them so far in time? If they pictured the crucifixion it would be more natural to do them together.

Ignoring the possibility that Paul may have received the Eucharist story in a vision and not from witnesses of Jesus, page 202 says his Eucharist story is from history. Then why did Paul talk as if the story was being disputed and contradicted by Christians in Corinth? His saying he received the rite from the Lord is telling them that the rite is God’s truth (page 218). This is a kind of oath so he cannot use history to defend the rite but only his word meaning he instituted the Eucharist not Jesus. He tells them that he received it from the Lord and passed it on to them to ensure that they will accept it and stop abusing the rite to do nasty things. Obviously, they were ignoring the meaning of the rite because they did not take the alleged origin of the rite seriously and had to be reminded of what it stood for.

Page 219 errs in saying that Jesus did the Eucharist knowing he was in mortal danger. Jesus believed he would be killed eventually but there is no reason to think he thought the danger was immediate from what Paul tells us. Moreover, Paul’s Jesus says that his body is for his disciples and the cup is the new covenant in his blood. Paul concludes from these words that therefore when we eat and drink we remember Jesus’ death. But nothing in the words indicates a violent death. The bread is the body of Jesus for his friends but it is not said to be killed for them. The cup is not his blood but the new covenant in his blood. Jesus then was able to inaugurate the new covenant without physically shedding blood. His death whatever form it would take, even a natural one, would still be him giving his body and blood that is his whole self to seal the covenant. However it is more natural to hold that a violent death involving bleeding was meant. But with symbolism one cannot be too sure. From the wording of Paul’s Eucharist rite, we can be sure that the gospels lie that Jesus held the rite for he knew his death was near. In the gospels, it is the death of Jesus that starts the covenant and it is with Paul as well. He speaks continually of how the death of Jesus for our sins redeems us. Clearly then the supper happened or was revealed AFTER the crucifixion. The gospels are lying that the supper happened before.

Jesus must have had these meals and insisted on equality and sharing at them. That is why Paul when criticising the Christians for making differences at their meals brings it up. The indications of equality would be Jesus serving the disciples with bread and wine and them sharing it among themselves so it is all equal. There is no priest. There is nobody who is in any way better than anybody else. Jesus even vows to give away his life for his friends. There is no room in any of this for people who claim to have a higher rank than others like Catholic priests do. There is no room at this table for even a Jesus who says he is the Son of God and the Messiah and an exorcist and healer. This Jesus was an ordinary normal man who got remarkable rewards for his devotion to God, exaltation to divine sonship and Christship at his resurrection.

The Eucharist must have been a regular thing with Jesus when Paul says we must run our regular meals in the same way that Jesus ran them. This would deny that the Last Supper was a Passover meal but it was just a friendship meal one of many Jesus held. Again this contradicts the gospels. Page 226 is right to say the Eucharist meal or Last Supper was not a Passover meal at all.

However, the narrative of the Eucharist does look so out of place for in 1 Corinthians 11 you can leave it out and the narrative runs more smoothly. Try it, read the chapter and omit verses 23 to 32. If it is an interpolation which it seems to be then the book Saint Saul should not be staking so much on it for getting meagre details about Jesus Christ. The interpolation was made to justify the invention of the Eucharist so it indicates that there were no traditions to help, the Eucharist was not history.

Page 302 tells us that the bit in Luke’s account of the Last Supper which is called the Long Text is fake. It has Jesus blessing the cup twice. This would bid us to accept the Short Text which does not say that Jesus spoke of body and blood and indicates that only bread was used at the supper.