One more illustration that Paul was outside the ring of conspirators who were the founders, as forgers, of Historic Christianity in
Rome, and I shall have done.
The Christ proclaimed by Peter and James was the mythical Messiah of the Time-cycles, the ever-coming one, converted into
an historical character; hence he who was supposed to have just come still remained the Coming One. He himself is made to
say that he is coming before the then present generation shall have passed away.
Apart from the mythos and its meaning, there was no other coming, or end of the Times, of the age, Æon, or world! The
Kronian allegory can only apply to the Kronian Christ, as the metaphorical manifestor of the Eternal in the sphere of time, who
could neither be made flesh nor assume historic personality. This was known to Paul as an Adept. Such things were an
Allegory; but it was not known to those who preached that "other gospel." James asserts that "the coming of the Lord is at
hand." John declares that it is the Last Hour. In the Second Epistle of Peter we find the writer mentions Paul by name, and
replies to his Epistles. He is covertly trying to counteract the influence of Paul's teaching on a matter of such importance as the
second coming of Christ, and the immediate ending of the world. In the first chapter he proclaims that the end of all things is
at hand. Here he says that mockers are asking, "Where is the promise of his coming?" They forget the cataclysms and
deluges by which the previous heavens and earth have perished. This time the end will come with a universal conflagration, and,
according to promise, "We look for new heavens and a new earth." . . . "Our beloved brother, Paul, has been speaking
of these things. . . . According to the wisdom given to him he wrote unto you; as also in his Epistles, speaking in them
in these things; wherein are some things hard to understand, which the ignorant and unsteadfast wrest (as also the
other scriptures) unto their own destruction." The subject-matter here is the nature of the time-cycles, and the mythical
destruction by flood and fire, which Paul as an Adept knew to be typical and allegorical. Peter mistakes them for literal realities.
Being an outsider, he did not understand the Wisdom or Gnosis of Paul, but says it is misleading, inasmuch as the ignorant
wrest it unto their own destruction. Peter had also said the day of the Lord will come as a thief. To this we have direct replies
from Paul. "Concerning the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need that aught be written unto you. For
yourselves know perfectly well that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. But ye, brethren, are not in
darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief; for ye are all sons of light and sons of the day; we are not of the
night nor of the darkness"--as were those foolish Physicalists, the Petrine A-Gnostics. And again he says to the Thessalonians--"Now we
beseech you, brethren, touching the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and our gathering together unto him, that ye be
not quickly shaken from your mind, nor yet be troubled either by spirit, or by word, or by epistle as from us! as that
day of the Lord is present at hand. Let no man beguile you in any wise;" give no heed to that ignoramus' gobemoucherie!
Then follows a break in the sense. But a falling away is to come first, and the Man of Sin must be revealed or exposed; the son
of perdition, "he that opposeth and exalteth himself against all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he
sitteth in the Temple of God setting himself forth as God." That, I say, is St. Paul's opposer, Peter, who was set up in the
Church of Rome. "Remember ye not that when I was with you I told you these things. And now ye know that which
restraineth to the end that he may be revealed in his own season. For the mystery of lawlessness doth already work
only until he that restraineth now shall be taken out of the way. And then shall be revealed the Lawless one whom the
Lord Jesus shall slay with the breath of his mouth, and bring to nought by the manifestation of his coming, (him) whose
'coming' is according to the working of Satan, with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with all deceit of
unrighteousness for them that are perishing, because they received not the love of truth that they might be saved; and
for this cause God sendeth them a working of error that they should believe a lie." In both quotations the subject-matter
identifies Peter as palpably as if Paul had named him. He is replying to the teaching of one particular man who is proclaiming the
"Coming" of the Christ and the day of the Lord, or end of the world, as being close at hand. He says in effect--Do not be
troubled or beguiled by any such ignorant trash. The Lord will not come in his sense, and cannot come in mine, except that man
of sin be revealed. No one has ever dared to dream that this "Man of Sin" is Peter himself! But the person aimed at is
considered capable of forging epistles in the name of Paul; thus attributing this kind of teaching to him, and making him father it
whilst Paul was yet living. This "man of sin" and "son of perdition" has set himself up in the temple of God, setting himself forth
as God. This is no emperor Nero, but a portrait of Peter, the life-long enemy of Paul; he whose preaching is concerning signs
and lying wonders, such as the stories about the end of the world, the passing away of the heavens with a great noise, the
dissolution of the elements with fervent heat, and the burning up of the earth with all the works therein, and other teachings of
this cataclysmalist, which Paul denounces as delusive, and knows to be a lie! This misleader of men is restrained for the time
being by Paul himself, but when he departs Peter will reveal himself or be revealed in his true colours, and the Thessalonians will
then see what Paul has known all along, and against which he had warned them once before, i.e., against that working of error
and belief in a lie, which we now know by name as Historic Christianity.
It is here, then, that we can peer right down into the deep, dark gulf that divided Peter from Paul, of which we get such a
lightning glimpse in the Clementine Homilies. These writings were inspired by the faction of Peter. By them Paul is designated
the "Hostile Man"; his own epithet, Anomas, the Lawless, is there flung back at him by Peter, who denounces the puerile
preaching of the man that is his enemy, and who says: "Thou hast opposed thyself as an Adversary against me, the firm
rock, the foundation of the Church." Paul's conversion, by means of abnormal vision, is attributed to the false Christ, the
Gnostic and Spiritualist opposed to an Historic Christ. In Homily 17, Peter is obviously hitting at Paul and his visions when he
asks: "Can anyone be instituted to the office of a teacher through visions?" Paul is treated as the arch-enemy of the Christ
crucified--he is the very Anti-Christ. He will be the author of some great heresy which is expected to break out in the future.
Peter is said to have declared that Christ instructed the disciples not to publish the only true and genuine gospel for the present,
because the false teacher must arise, who would publicly proclaim the false gospel of the Anti-Christ that was the Christ of the
Gnostics. "As the true Prophet has told us, the false gospel must come from a certain misleader;" and so they were to go
on secretly promulgating the true gospel, until this false preacher had passed away. This true gospel was confessedly "held in
reserve, to be secretly transmitted for the rectification of future heresies." They knew well enough what had to come out,
if Paul's preaching, proclaimed in his original Epistles, got vent more and more. It was Paul whom they had reason to fear.
Hence those who were the followers of Peter and James anathematized him as the great apostate, and rejected his Epistles.
Justin Martyr never once mentions this founder of Christianity, never once refers to the writings of Paul. Strangest thing of all is
it that the book of the Acts, which is mainly the history of Paul, should contain no account of his martyrdom or death in Rome!
The gulf, however, cannot be completely fathomed, except on the grounds that there was no personal Christ, and that Paul was
the natural opponent of the men who were setting up the Christ made flesh for the salvation of the world that never was lost.
My conclusion is, that fabricated evidence is the sole support of Historic Christianity which can be derived from the Epistles of
Paul; that the manipulation for an ulterior purpose, which is so obvious in the book of Acts, was far more subtly and
fundamentally applied to his Epistles and doctrines; that they have been worked over as thieves manipulate stolen linen when
they pick out the marks of ownership to escape from detection; that false doctrines have been foisted into the original text,
which seems to have been withheld for a century after the writer's death, until the leaven of falsehood had done its fatal work.
The problem of the plotters and forgers in Rome was how to convert the mythical Christology into historic Christianity, and
when Paul's Epistles were permitted to emerge from obscurity in a collection, what had occurred was the restoration of the carnalised Christ, that "other Jesus" who was repudiated by Paul in his own lifetime. Paul felt or
feared, and foretold that this would be the case when once he was removed out of the way. He saw the mystery of lawlessness
already at work--the falsifiers sending forth letters as if from himself--and we have seen what Paul foresaw! the problem of the
plotters who forged the foundations of the Church in Rome was how to successfully blend the Christ Jesus of the Gnostics, of
the pre-Christian Apocrypha, of Philo, and of Paul, with that Corporeal Christ and impossible personality, in whom they
ignorantly believed, through a blind literalisation of mythology, so as to make the historic look like the true starting-point, and
the Gnostic interpretation becomes a later heresy. This was finally effected when the declaration of John--that "the Word was
made flesh and dwelt among us"--had been accepted as the genuine Gospel, and that which had been an impossibility for the
Gnostics was an accomplished fact for those who knew no better than to believe. The Gospel, according to John, was
concocted and calculated to serve as a harmonising amalgam of doctrines that were fundamentally opposed. In this Amalgam
they tried to mix the "gall and honey," so that, if "well shaken before taken," it might be swallowed by the followers on both
sides. But there was a great gulf forever fixed between the Gnostic Christology and Historic Christianity. It was a gulf that never
could be soundly bridged, and never has been plumbed, or bottomed, or filled in. The bodies of two million martyrs of
free-thought, put to death as heretics, in Europe alone, and all the blood that has ever been shed in Christian wars, have failed
to fill that gulf, which waits as ever wide-jawed for its prey. Across that gulf the Christian Church was erected upon supports
on either side. On one side stood those pillars of the Church which were seen by Paul in Jerusalem. On the other was Paul
himself, the pillar that stood alone. A difference the most radical and profound divided him from the other apostles, Cephas,
John, and James. From the first they were on two sides of the chasm that could not be closed; and the Prædicatio Petri
declares that Peter and Paul remained unreconciled till death. The great work of the first centuries was how to bridge the chasm
over, or at least how to conceal it from the eyes of the world in later times. This could only be done by resting on Paul as a
prop and buttress on the one side and Peter on the other, which had to be done by converting or perverting the Epistles of the
Gnostic Paul into a support for Historic Christianity. In that way the Church was founded. It was built as a bridge across the
gulf, and the Pope of Rome appointed and aptly designated Pontifex Maximus. It was reared above the chasm lying darkly
lurking like an open grave below, and to-day, as ever, the Christian world is horribly haunted with the fear that a breath or two
of larger intellectual life, a too audible utterance of free-er thought, a dose of mental dynamite may bring the edifice of error
down in wreck and ruin to fill that gulf at last, over which it was so perilously founded from the first. |
