here is the truth and my purpose of being here. It is to share
my truth to others. It is copied from the wsriting of M.P. Hall.
The mythical Christ was as surely continued from Egypt as were the mythical
types of the Christ on the Gnostic Stones and in the Catacombs of Rome!
Once this ground is felt to be firm underfoot it emboldens and warrants us
in cutting the Gordian knot that has been so deftly complicated for us in
the Epistles of Paul. To-day we have to face a problem that is one of the
most difficult; it is my object to prove that Paul was the opponent and not
the apostle of Historic Christianity. It is well known to all serious
students of the subject that there was an original rent or rift of
difference between the preacher Paul and the other founders of Christianity,
whom he first met in Jerusalem--namely, Cephas (or Peter), James, and John.
He did not think much of them personally, but scoffs a little at their
pretensions to being Pillars of the Church. Those men had nothing in common
with him from the first, and never forgave him for his independence and
opposition to the last. But the depth of that visible rift has not yet been
fathomed in consequence of false assumptions; and my own researches and
determination to look and think for myself have led me to the inevitable
conclusion that there is but one way in which it can be bottomed for the
first time.
It is likewise more or less apprehended that two voices are heard contending in Paul's Epistles,
to the confounding of the writer's sense and the confusion of the reader's.
They utter different doctrines, so fundamentally opposed as to be for ever
irreconcilable; and this duplicity of doctrine makes Paul, who is the one
distinct and single-minded personality of the "New Testament," look like the
most double-faced of men; double-tongued as the serpent. The two doctrines
are those of the Gnostic, or Spiritual Christ, and the historic Jesus. Both
cannot be true to Paul; and my contention is that both voices did not
proceed from him personally.
We know that Paul and the other Apostles did not preach the same gospel;
and it is my present purpose to show that they did not set forth or
celebrate the same Christ. My thesis is, that Paul was not a supporter of
the system known as Historical Christianity, which was founded on a belief
in the Christ carnalised; an assumption that the Christ had been made flesh;
but that he was its unceasing and deadly opponent during his lifetime; and
that after his death his writings were tampered with, interpolated, and
re-indoctrinated by his old enemies, the forgers and falsifiers, who first
began to weave the web of the Papacy in Rome. In this way there was added
a fourth pillar or corner-stone to the original three in Jerusalem, which
was turned into the chief support of the whole structure; the firmest
foundation of the fallacious faith.
The supreme feat, performed in secret by the managers of the Mysteries in
Rome, was this conversion of the Epistles of Paul into the main support of
Historic Christianity! It was the very pivot on which the total imposture
turned! In his lifetime he had fought tooth and nail, with tongue and pen,
against the men who founded the faith of the Christ made flesh, and damned
eternally all disbelievers; and after his death they reared the Church of
the Sarkolatr‘ above his tomb, and for eighteen centuries have, with a f
forged warrant, claimed him as being the first and foremost among the
founders. They cleverly dammed the course of the natural river that flowed
forth from its own independent source in the Epistles of Paul, and turned
its waters into their own artificial canal, so that Paul's living force
should be made to float the bark of Peter.
Nevertheless, those who care to look closely will see that the two waters,
like those of the river Rhone, will not mingle in one colour! And it appears
to me that, whether Paul was mad or not in this life, such nefarious
treatment of his writings was bad enough to drive him frantic in the next,
and make him insane there until the wrong is righted.
It is the universal assumption that Paul, the persecutor of the early
Christians, was converted by a vision of the risen Jesus, who proved
historic nature and identity by appearing to Paul in person. So it is
recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. The account, however, is entirely
opposed to that which is given by Paul himself in his Epistle to the
Galatians. He tells how the change occurred, which has been called his
conversion. It was by revelation of the Christ within, but not by an
objective vision of a personal Jesus, who demonstrated in spirit world
the reality and identity of an historic Jesus of Nazareth, who had lately
lived on earth.
Such a version as that is rigorously impossible, according to Paul's
own words. His account of the matter is totally antipodal. He received his
commission to preach the Christ, as he declares, "when it was the good
pleasure of God to reveal his Son in me," and therefore not by an apparition
of Jesus of Nazareth outside of him! His Christ within was not the Corpus
of Christian belief, but the Christ of the Gnosis. He heard no voice
external to himself, which could be converted into the audible voice of an
historic Jesus; and nothing can be more instructive to begin with, than a
comparative study of these two versions, for showing how the matter has
been manipulated, and the facts perverted, for the purpose of establishing
or supporting an orthodox history. What he did hear when caught up in the
spirit he tells us was unspeakable; words which it is not lawful for a man
to utter! He makes no mention of a Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed, Jesus of
Nazareth is unknown to Paul! His name never once appears in the Epistles;
and the significance of the fact in favour of the present view can hardly
be exaggerated. So, Jesus of Nazareth does not appear in the Gospel of
Marcion; or, as it was represented by some of the Christian Fathers,
Marcion had removed the name of Jesus of Nazareth from his particular
Gospel--being so virulent a heretic! Here we find Paul in agreement with
Marcion, the Gnostic rejecter of Jesus of Nazareth, and of historic
Christianity.
Moreover, Paul was the only apostle of the true Christ who was recognised
by Marcion. Now,as Marcion had rejected the human nature of the Christ, and
left the sect which ultimately became the church of historic Christianity,
it is impossible that he could have adopted or upheld the Gospel of Paul as
it has come down to us in our version of the Epistles. Hence, Iren‘us
complains that Marcion dismembered the Epistles of Paul, and removed those
passages from the prophetical writings which had been quoted to teach us
that they announced beforehand the coming of the Lord! That is, Marcion, the
man who knew, recognised his fellow-Gnostic in Paul, but rejected the
literalisations and the spurious doctrines which had been surreptitiously
interpolated by the founders, who were the forgers, of Historic
Christianity. Further, with regard to the Marcionites, Iren‘us says they
allege that Paul alone, of all the Christian teachers, knew the truth; and
that to him the Mystery was manifested by revelation. They spoke as Gnostics
of a Gnostic. At the same time, as Iren‘us tells us, the Gnostics, of whom
Marcion was one, charged the other Apostles with hypocrisy, because they
forced their teaching on the blindness; for the dull, according to their
dulness; for those in error, according to their errors."
Clement Alexander asserts that Paul, before going to Rome, stated that he
would bring to the Brethren (not the true Gospel history, but) the Gnosis,
or Gnostic communication, the tradition of the hidden mysteries, as the
fulness of the blessings of Christ, which Clement says were revealed by
the Son of God, the "teacher who trains the Gnostic by mysteries," i.e., by
revelations made in the state of trance. He was going there as a Gnostic,
and therefore as the natural opponent of Historic Christianity.
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