In a court, the weightiest testimony often comes from a witness the other side has called. A man who speaks against his own interest has no motive to lie, and a verdict he confirms stands the firmer for it. The case against Paul has such witnesses.
None of those below owed anything to Islam. Each belonged to the Christian or Jewish world that Paul’s religion shaped, and each reached, by his own road, the verdict this site reaches.
The statesman and the lawyer
The first came from the young American republic. Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States, compiled from the Gospels a book of the teachings of Jesus alone, stripped of miracle and divinity and of every writing of Paul, and he named the man he held responsible for burying them.1 Of the “band of dupes and impostors”, he wrote in 1820, “Paul was the great Coryphaeus, and first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus.”2
Three years later the English jurist Jeremy Bentham, the founder of legal reform in his country, examined Paul as a lawyer examines a defendant, and published the result under an assumed name. His finding on the vow Paul took in the Temple, a charge of perjury under the ordinary law of oaths, is weighed in The character of Paul.
The philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche, son of a Lutheran pastor, turned the same scrutiny on Paul’s character and wrote as an enemy of every creed. His charge falls on the apostle, where the site’s own case places it; his words are weighed in The character of Paul.
The scholars
The universities followed where the statesman and the philosopher had led. William Wrede, a Lutheran professor at Breslau, judged that Paul was “the second founder of Christianity”, and that beside the first he exercised the stronger influence, though not the better one.3
The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber drew the line between the two men in the language of faith itself, a contrast set out under Seven doctrines.
The New Testament scholar Michael Goulder, reviving the reading of the early church first proposed at Tübingen, found the seam that Acts conceals and the hand that chose the canon; his findings are weighed in Why Luke does not know Paul’s letters and in How Paul came to own the New Testament.
The playwright
Bernard Shaw, no Muslim and no churchman, put the whole case in a single sentence: “There has really never been a more monstrous imposition perpetrated than the imposition of the limitations of Paul’s soul upon the soul of Jesus.”4
Their verdict
Statesman and lawyer, philosopher, scholars and playwright came from different nations and centuries, and none of them shared the faith of this site. Their testimony agrees with the witnesses who came before them: James the brother of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam, the first church, the revelation, and the scholars of Islam. When those called for the defence testify for the prosecution, the case against Paul stands proved a fortiori.
- Thomas Jefferson, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904); Edwin S. Gaustad, Sworn on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), pp. 119–121. ↩
- Thomas Jefferson to William Short, 13 April 1820, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, vol. 15, pp. 538–541; Founders Online, National Archives. ↩
- William Wrede, Paul, trans. Edward Lummis (London: Philip Green, 1907), p. 179. ↩
- Bernard Shaw, “Preface on the Prospects of Christianity,” in Androcles and the Lion, Overruled, Pygmalion (London: Constable, 1916), the sentence that closes his account of Paul’s conversion. ↩
