Robert said

It is anachronistic to attribute the result of multiple generations to Paul himself. Pretty simple really.   

If Paul had not become an ‘apostle’ of Jesus well after the crucifixion (anachronistic to begin with), would we be having this conversation?  Possible, I suppose, but I suspect most people would have no idea what we were talking about–some obscure cult that either died out, or eked out a marginal existence at the fringes of society.  

I don’t think you’re seriously denying Paul’s influence (Bart certainly does not, based on The Triumph of Christianity), and I’m forced to conclude you are picking nits here.  That’s not interesting to me.  And I think you badly misunderstood what I said.  Which may be my fault, but why not just take my word for it, graciously?  I think you’ve been spending too much time with the likes of Steefen and Brenmcg.  😉

You wouldn’t be arguing that there’s anyone who doesn’t have them, though?

Not backing away from anything I said, just trying to make you understand it.  Paul never told himself “I’m creating a new religion” but that’s what he spent the latter part of his life doing.  I believe what people do more than what they say.  That’s always a safe assumption.  We tend to forget about it on the internet, since nobody actually does anything here.  😉

Where the hell did you get that from anything I typed?   If you can’t even understand a living person talking to you, what hope have you of understanding somebody dead for millennia? 

Paul wanted to make something that lasted.  He found he had a gift for persuasion, and organization, and he saw something growing that he had helped to nurture and shape, and it gave him a sense of meaning in his life.  That something was a religion in embryo, and I don’t think he was so stupid as not to understand that on some level, even while he waited in joyful hope for the return of a man he’d never met.

I understand you know far more about this subject than I do, but the subject that seems to baffle you is people, and without an understanding of human nature (which never changes, as a Russian history prof once told me and my classmates at CUNY Grad), the study of history is entirely pointless and futile. 

Paul had a vision of Jesus, that he believed was real.  And from there, he was easily able to persuade himself that what he wanted, Jesus wanted.  It’s an old story, with innumerable variations.  Plato and Socrates, for example (at least Plato knew Socrates, but the Socrates in Plato’s dialogues isn’t the Socrates who lived, is he now?)

If I don’t see a meaningful response from you, I think I’ll just let the matter drop.  Bart’s post about banging your head against a wall is still fresh in my memory. 

Paul is creating a church.  If you argue with that, I don’t know what to tell you.  He is creating the foundation of a lasting institution, and you don’t do that by accident. 

Jesus was just trying to preach the coming of the Kingdom, giving people the entry requirements, but Paul is doing much more than that.  He’s trying to rationalize it, give it substance, give it the basis for going on, even if Jesus isn’t coming back anytime soon. 

I’m a bit bleary this morning, and you caught me.  I did say that (it’s an internet forum, and people say all kinds of things).  But what else would you call it?  What do you think he’s doing?  And why?  What difference does it make?  He goes out of his way to make himself the Apostle to the gentiles–who Jesus had no great interest in reaching out to (assuming that the good ones would make it to the Kingdom their own way). 

Scores of eminent writers have called Paul the true founder of Christianity.  What do you think he was?  You want to study the texts, but the texts were written by a person , and you’re supposed to be able to find that person in the texts–and in what little you know of that person’s life, which is damned little in Paul’s case (and some of it probably inaccurate), but it’s still something.  Endless parsing of seven letters won’t get the job done.  If you can’t put yourself in his place, you’re spinning your wheels. 

Paul considered Judaism the only true religion, as Jesus did.  But something about the Judaism he was raised with must have been unsatisfying to him.  He was looking for something else.  He had his vision, and decided Jesus was it. 

But he knows his people too well–they won’t convert in any great numbers.  And conversion is what he wants.  (Conversion to what?)  Who can he convert?  Gentiles.  How can he do it?  By getting rid of the requirements of Jewish law that gentiles find unappealing (a new form of Judaism, which he would never refer to as such).  So he abandons most of what he was raised with–for what?  Why is he doing this?  His own letters say all he has to do to gain the Kingdom is to believe in Jesus.  He’s obsessed with making everyone see the same thing he does–which is different from what the original disciples saw. 

This is how religions start–with the obsessive need to make everyone see the same vision you do.  This is what Paul is doing, and this is why, however he explained it to himself, there is no way to call what he did anything other than creating a new religion, because that’s the only way he can satisfy the missionary impulse burning inside of him. 

My final word.  Have yours.  See you elsewhere. 

(editing) Well, here’s someone else’s words–

Even while granting that Paul saw himself principally as one who was “called,” we should not jettison too quickly the term “conversion” for what he experienced. True, in his own eyes he did not stop being a Jew or think he was preaching a message at odds with Judaism. But he did “turn around”—the literal meaning of “conversion”—making a radical change in his understanding of that religion and, even more obviously, in his understanding of Christ, rejecting his earlier view of Jesus as condemned by God and coming to see him as God’s messiah. And so possibly it is best to consider his experience as both a call and a conversion.

Ehrman, Bart D.. The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World (p. 57). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

And he could not possibly make gentiles into Jews.

And yet he was compelled to convert them.

TO WHAT?