© 1999 Raymonde and Jean Davier
© 1999 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
| Le Lien Urantien — Issue 12 — Winter 1999 — Contents | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 12 — Winter 1999 | The Decision Center |
Many works have commented on the work of Paul, the principal founder, with the apostles, of the Christian religion.
Paul was born in Tarsus in Cilicia at the very beginning of the 1st millennium. He was a contemporary of the apostles of Jesus and the disciples of John the Baptist, whom he met and rubbed shoulders with. He belonged to the Jewish community of his hometown and he enjoyed Roman citizenship. His family must have belonged to the ruling class, this situation inclines to a progressive Romanization expressed by his two names: Saul is his Hebrew name and Paul his Roman-sounding name. His first language is Aramaic, which is suitable for the exercise of Hebrew theology: he is a learned Pharisee. But it is in Greek that he addresses his letters to the first Christian communities. It would seem that two main influences guided his religious thought: that of Mithraism, the dominant cult in his hometown, and that of Stoicism. He works as a tentmaker in order to survive during his many and trying travels throughout the Mediterranean basin.
The Acts of the Apostles reveal the founding events that shaped the life of Saul of Tarsus. In Jerusalem he witnessed the stoning of the Greek Stephen by his Jewish persecutors. This proselyte of the Christian belief, who was not a member of the Jewish religion, came up against the traditional practices of Hebrew worship. This first martyr marked the break: the new faith would no longer be a sect within Judaism.
The Pharisee Saul perceived the faith, the audacity, the extraordinary courage of Stephen who died rather than deny a transcendent cause whose spirituality progresses in an ineluctable way in the face of ancestral and stagnant religious practices.
On the road to Damascus, Saul experiences his own transfiguration. His spiritual experience is authentic. His conversion is sudden, spectacular, different from the slow progress of classical spiritual seekers. He becomes the servant of those he wanted to destroy by violence. He heard in a divine clarity that would blind him momentarily the “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” “Later, Saul became the dynamic and indomitable Paul, the philosopher, if not the founder of the Christian religion” (UB 128:3.6).
Saul remained marked by his past as a persecutor. He wrote to Titus: “I acted in ignorance.” He declared in Jerusalem: “I persecuted to the death… loading with chains, throwing into prison men and women” (Acts 22-4). In his letter to the Corinthians, he said: “I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to bear this title, because I persecuted the church of God” (1 Cor 15-9).
Paul becomes a servant and witness of the new faith. His Christian brothers trust him. The Acts of the Apostles and his letters to the new churches are the testimony of his missionary activity throughout the Roman Empire. He obeys the precepts: “Go teach the nations” (Mat 28-18/20). Probably ill or of weak constitution, a mediocre speaker, he travels in difficult conditions with the total absence of comfort specific to the time. He will be shipwrecked several times. Paul invests himself totally. He creates the first Christian communities of the Mediterranean basin, which he teaches and encourages. He speaks with Peter, James and John, moves away from Judaism and becomes the apostle of the pagans. He flees persecution in Jerusalem, he reaches Antioch, a city with a thousand priestesses devoted to orgiastic worship, a city of vice but paradoxically fertile in conversions. He attracts the distrust of the local sanhedrins who will have him flogged, beaten, stoned, and chased away. From there, he leaves for Antioch in Pisidia, then Athens, a city where, according to Petronius, it is more difficult to meet a man than a god. He goes to Iconium, Lystra. He is ill in Galatia. He plays a major role in Corinth, then in Cyprus, the island of Aphrodite, where he discourses with the proconsul Sergius Paulus. By a long journey through evils and perils, he crosses Asia Minor, Greece where he arouses both enthusiasm and division. He meets and influences Luke, the Greek doctor, writer of a gospel. He arrives in Ephesus, a city full of pilgrims who have come to worship the goddess Artemis, contacts Apollos preaching the baptism of John and addresses the Stoics and Epicureans, but triggers the revolt of the goldsmiths, founders of idol statues. He flees to Troy, Tyre, Ptolemais, Caesarea, and finally Jerusalem, where he is interrogated and detained for two and a half years by the procurator Felix. Paul appeals to Caesar, leaves for Rome, and during the journey visits the Christians of Crete and Malta. It would seem that he also had an experience as a hermit in the desert according to apocryphal sources. His mission will last a little over twenty years before perishing with his head cut off during his second stay in Rome, around the year 67 according to Eusebius, at the time of Nero and shortly after the fire in the city which triggered new persecutions against Christians. Shortly before his death, he will confide: “all have abandoned me”.
Paul has faith, devotion, and courage, without measure. He pushed all his human possibilities to the limit to create solid communities of believers. The work accomplished will result in the development of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire. But let us never forget that Paul is, and remained a man of the first century, with the philosophical ideas and religious customs of that time. Let us cite some of the influences he underwent:
Judaism — Before its destruction in the year 70, the temple of Jerusalem functioned as a true monarchical institution. It restored unity to tribal religions. Within its walls, seasonal festivals took place, including Easter, in memory of the people’s exodus from Egypt. Sacrificial meals, processions, and various offerings were ordered by a greedy and powerful clergy. Abraham and Moses were venerated as founders, prophets, and liberators. They recalled the demands of the Decalogue placed in the Ark of the Covenant of the temple where the God of Israel resided in glory. This religion despised half of humanity because we read in the Torah: “It is better to burn the word of the law than to entrust it to a woman.”
Stoicism — it is a vision of the world systematized by paradoxes. On this subject, the philosopher Zeno writes: “wisdom is the science of divine and human things”. Plato advises “a life in accordance with virtue in harmony with nature”, and evokes a cosmic theology. Seneca suggests a proximity between God and the wise, good man. Epictetus establishes a true dialogue between the just believer and the God who will welcome him at his death. A hymn to the gods, including Zeus master of the Universe, assimilates them to natural powers and achieves unity and communion of the cosmos with man who holds a part of the logos.
Philo of Alexandria — this Jewish philosopher of Hellenistic training, contemporary of Jesus, made a synthesis between the Judaic tradition and Greek philosophies. He considers Abraham and Moses as the ideal of kings and prophets. He is an eclectic who mixes Platonism, Stoicism and Pythagoreanism in a doctrine which establishes a dialogue between the Divine Being and earthly realities. He will influence the epistles of Paul and Johannine thought.
Mystery cult, Mithra — it is an initiatory religion reserved for men. The mystery is celebrated under vaults or underground spaces. The initiates share a ritual meal of bread and wine. It is a Greco-Iranian syncretism with the three gods Apollo, Helios and Hermes. The themes mix fertility, astrology and the cult of the hero with the miraculous birth.
Mother cult — This cult continued in Crete at the beginning of the first millennium. It was incorporated into the Christian religion under the pretext of worshiping Mary, the earthly mother of Jesus.
The texts attributed to Paul were declared foundational, canonical, by several councils of the early church. Paul makes a commendable attempt to make the gospel more acceptable to followers of the older religions, but he incorporates into Christianity elements that are totally foreign to the gospel of Jesus.
The Urantia Book in UB 196:2.1-2, “Paul incorporates his own theological views, describes his experience, his personal religious convictions…, but loses sight of the human Jesus who by his faith, with his Adjuster, rises from the human condition to divinity”.
However, Paul founded a higher, more spiritual cult than the previous pagan cults. He renounced “magical rites, ceremonial enchantments, but stumbled over the doctrine of redemption, did not see the Adjuster, theorized original sin, the doctrines of hereditary guilt, of innate evil, of his Redemption whose origin is partially Mithraic” (UB 121:5.14).
Paul was influenced by the Romanized Greeks who “brought their philosophical convictions, coordinated ideas, systematized ideals.” (UB 195:2.5).
The Christian ritual will be copied from that of the synagogues. The cult of the mysteries, especially that of Mithra and the cult of the emperor will add the pageantry of pagan ceremonies to the new religion “about Jesus”.
Let us underline Paul’s personal influence on the problems of renunciation, asceticism, continence and the place of women in society. We note in his letter to the Christians of Corinth “It is good for a man not to touch a woman…, I say therefore to the celibate and the widows to remain as I am…, that the women keep silence in the assemblies” (1 Cor, 7 to 14). “I do not allow a woman to teach” (Ti, 2-12). He thus favors the creation of priestly castes composed of celibate priests, the beginnings of the future medieval and inquisitorial order. Thus, “The church, a socialized and humanized shadow, supplants the spiritual concept of the Kingdom lived and taught by Jesus” (UB 170:5.6).
What can we say about Paul’s paradox? We have noted, in The Urantia Book, a fundamental passage that deserves reflection: “Paul hardly thought that his well-intentioned letters to his converts would later be considered by Christians as the word of God…, educators of good will, like him, must not be held responsible for the use that successors who came much later will have made of their writings.” (UB 98:7.9).
It is up to us to envisage the future with a flexible organization and indispensable coordinators who will make possible our need for sharing and brotherly love. Prohibiting all prohibitions or human directives is the source of certain divergences. The essential thing is not to forget this Man-God who erases all traces of himself after his passage on earth, but who maintains an ineffable presence, a spiritual density, an intimate proximity in each of those who want it. Let us remember what Jesus wrote in the sand, what he said to the Canaanite woman, his presence to defend the woman falsely accused of adultery. In Bethsaida, speaking to John, he said: “God lives in you, he has become what you are, to make you what He is.” (UB 148:6.10)
An extract from the chapter of the Urantia Book in UB 194:3.15 will serve as our conclusion: “the mother and a brother of Jesus were among the 180 believers who received the Spirit of Pentecost which marked the end of all priesthood or differentiation of sex, caste and racial distinction”.
Paul has the last word: “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.”
Raymonde and Jean Davier
| Le Lien Urantien — Issue 12 — Winter 1999 — Contents | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 12 — Winter 1999 | The Decision Center |