The church that followed Paul

Western sources have shown that Christian teaching today does not derive from the true message of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam (ʿalayhi al-salām, peace be upon him), but that awareness is no discovery of contemporary scholars. As early as the eleventh century, the Muslim scholar Abū Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī (973–1048) affirmed that the name Christian, from the Greek Χριστιανός (Christianos), was never used by ʿĪsā ibn Maryam or his early followers.

It appeared later, introduced by the pagan society of Antioch around 40 to 44 CE.¹ In his view the term does not represent the original teaching of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam; it reflects a new form of religion founded after he was raised to heaven.

More important, al-Bīrūnī stated that the true Injīl revealed to ʿĪsā ibn Maryam through the angel Jibrīl had been wholly altered or lost altogether. What is known as “gospel” today is a collection of four writings by different individuals, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, each writing in a different language, place and social setting. These gospels, in al-Bīrūnī’s judgment, are historical records of the life of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam later united under one collective name, and no sacred revelation of the kind Muslims believe in.²

That view agrees with the argument that post-Pauline Christianity departed wholly from the line of the prophets and was rearranged as a new system of belief, built on the theology of the cross and the concept of a divine man, which ʿĪsā ibn Maryam never taught. Paul led the process of deviation, and the church institutions that arose after him entrenched it. Modern Christian teaching no longer stands on the inheritance of the Urgemeinde, the original community.

It rests on the interpretation of Paul’s theological system, which separated faith from the law and raised a sinful man as a divine substitute in the narrative of salvation. James, the brother of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam, who once led the early community in Islamicjerusalem, was sidelined and finally vanished from the official history of the church. No voice representing the original understanding of al-Masīḥ remained in the church structure after 70 CE.

The despair of Peter

One interesting reading of the shift in thought among the early followers of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam is found in a study by Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln. Their work tends to the sensational and sometimes oversteps academic bounds in its conclusions, but its content rests on careful historical research, above all on the early development of the church and the influence of Paul. They propose that figures such as Simon Peter suffered a spiritual crisis when the hope of the coming of the kingdom of God went unfulfilled.

In that despair, Paul’s theological interpretation appeared as a “spiritual promise” replacing the literal expectation of the kingdom. Peter, they suggest, finally adjusted his understanding to Paul’s new teaching to keep the movement alive.³

The reading fits the historical fact that after the destruction of Islamicjerusalem in 70 CE, Paul’s teaching went unchallenged and was raised as the chief basis of the new church, while opponents such as James disappeared from the mainstream record. Whatever its academic standing, its argument about the psychological and theological subjugation of the disciples by Paul strengthens the conclusion: Paul’s teaching succeeded through internal manipulation and structural collapse, and never through the strength of truth.

Marcion

The influence of Paul’s teaching can be traced from the earliest post-apostolic era, when early thinkers began to interpret and build theological frames on his writings. Among the first was Marcion of Sinope (c. 85–160 CE) in the middle of the second century.

Marcion rejected the whole Old Testament and introduced a doctrine of two gods: the wrathful, punishing God of the Old Testament against the God of love he believed Paul had introduced. Marcion accepted only an edited Gospel of Luke and ten letters of Paul as scripture; Paul’s teaching was the raison d’être of his church.

Marcionism was later declared heretical by the mainstream church, but the phenomenon shows that Paul’s teaching alone was strong enough to form a Christian movement almost wholly cut off from its Jewish roots and the Torah. That extreme interpretation was not accepted everywhere. Against Marcion stood the Ebionites, the Nazarenes and the other Jewish followers of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam, whose testimony is set out in a separate article.

What the Romans saw

Non-Christian sources from the Roman era confirm that the early Christian movement grew on the belief that al-Masīḥ had risen and lived again after crucifixion. These sources lend the claim no support. The existence of outside records reporting the worship of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam as a “god” after his death shows how deeply the belief had rooted at an early stage, in line with Paul’s strategy of forming a new theology.

Tacitus (c. 56–120) writes, around 116 CE, that “Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate,” and that the belief “broke out once more, not merely in Judaea … but in the capital itself.”⁴

Pliny the Younger (c. 61–113), governor of Bithynia, reports in his letter to the emperor Trajan (c. 112 CE) that adherents of the teaching sang “a hymn to Christ as to a god” (carmenque Christo quasi deo dicere) and refused to curse him under interrogation.⁵ That stubbornness, in Pliny’s words, sprang from superstitio prava et immodica, “a depraved and extravagant superstition.”⁶

Lucian of Samosata (c. 125–180), in his satire The Death of Peregrinus, written around 165–170 CE, mocks the Christians’ belief in a crucified man worshipped as God and thought to give eternal life.⁷

The loudest criticism comes from Celsus (active c. 175), a Platonist philosopher writing around 175–180 CE, who held that the resurrection story was the hallucination of “a half-frantic woman,” magnified by deluded followers.⁸

All these writers lived and wrote decades after Paul’s death (c. 68 CE). What they observed was no longer the movement of the followers of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam in its original form, but a new religion that had undergone theological transfiguration, a religion founded on the dogma of resurrection, the divinity of al-Masīḥ and the abolition of the law, the core of the doctrine founded by Paul of Tarsus.

From Augustine to Barth

Centuries later Paul’s influence grew pari passu with the institution that canonized him. Augustine of Hippo (354–430), among the greatest theologians of the Latin tradition, built a whole doctrinal system of grace, Original Sin and predestination on his reading of Paul’s letters, above all the letter to the Romans.

His thought is the turning point in the institutionalization of Paul’s teaching as the official theology of the Western church. The idea that human beings are sinful by nature and can be saved only by God’s grace, without any part played by law or personal effort, is a direct inheritance from Paul, reinforced by Augustine.⁹

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), the chief figure of Catholic scholasticism, continued and extended that inheritance. Known for combining Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology, Aquinas also inherited Augustine’s view of grace and justification, itself built on the interpretation of Paul.

In his frame the law is only a road to grace, and no divine command to be obeyed for ever. That further entrenched Paul’s doctrine as the mainstream of Catholic theology.¹⁰

In the sixteenth century the Protestant Reformation, led by Martin Luther (1483–1546), read Romans 1 as the basis of the doctrine of sola fide, justification by faith. That teaching, rooted directly in Paul, rejected the part of works and law as a path to salvation.

John Calvin (1509–1564), the next figure of the Reformation, raised Paul’s letter to the Romans as the chief text for understanding all of scripture, and so placed Paul at the center of a new dogma.¹¹ The Reformation rearranged Paul’s influence more systematically and more doctrinally.

That influence goes on dominating the thought of the chief figures of modern Christian theology, who keep a strong affinity for Paul. Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930) affirmed the difference between “the religion of Jesus” and “the religion about Jesus,” in which Paul’s teaching became the basis for the form of Christianity that developed afterward. Von Harnack acknowledged the radical change Paul introduced and his influence in forming the institutional church.¹²

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), the father of modern liberal theology, stressed the human consciousness of absolute dependence on God. His concepts of sin and grace are closely bound to the interpretation of Paul’s teaching on faith and the relationship between humanity and God.¹³ Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) asserted faith as paradox and rejected rationalism in religion.

His interpretation of the cross and of faith is deeply shaped by Paul’s letters, above all the concepts of “absurd faith” and “absolute dependence.”¹⁴ Paul Tillich (1886–1965) built an existential theological frame that understands sin as existential estrangement and reads the cross as a symbol of salvation, rooted firmly in Paul’s teaching. He also regarded Paul as “the first Christian theologian.”¹⁵

Karl Barth (1886–1968), in his classic Der Römerbrief, read Paul’s letter to the Romans as divine judgment on every human effort to understand God through rationality or a moral system. For Barth the cross is the absolute rejection of every system founded by man. The interpretation still rests on Paul’s teaching, which makes human dependence on God’s grace the center.¹⁶

These figures, for all their differences of background and approach, all made Paul’s teaching the center of the theory and practice of modern Christian faith. From von Harnack studying the history of the church, Schleiermacher raising the experience of faith, Kierkegaard and Tillich exploring the existential dimension, to Barth’s radical reading of the cross, all acknowledge Paul’s dominant influence in forming Christian doctrine.¹⁷

The interpretation of Paul’s legacy did not develop uniformly across the Christian world. Among the churches rooted in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the approach to Paul’s teaching shows a different pattern. Where the West stressed judgment, Original Sin and justification, the East received the seeds of Paul’s thought in a more mystical and spiritual frame.¹⁸

There redemption is read less as the cancellation of guilt than as a process of healing and reunion with the divine nature. Paul’s legacy in that setting grew toward a theology focused on inner transformation, purification of character and participation in the divine life. The difference reflects distinct cultural and philosophical backgrounds, and spiritual environments that read the same message through different lenses.

That dominance never went uncriticized. While the mainstream church continued to defend Paul’s place as the pillar of its teaching, voices arose that dared to challenge the legacy, from outside the Christian tradition and from influential figures within Western thought itself.

1. Acts 11:26. ↩
2. Abū Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī, Kitāb al-Āthār al-Bāqiyah ʿan al-Qurūn al-Khāliyah, in Abdupattaev Mumin Mirzo Murodjon ugli, “Abu Rayhan Biruni’s Views on Christianity,” EPRA International Journal of Research and Development, vol. 9, no. 3 (March 2024), pp. 132–134. ↩
3. Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, The Messianic Legacy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986), pp. 84–90. ↩
4. Tacitus, Annals 15.44. The passage reads: “Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate … the mischievous superstition was checked for a moment, only to break out once more, not merely in Judaea, the home of the disease, but in the capital itself.” ↩
5. Pliny the Younger, Epistulae 10.96. ↩
6. ibid. ↩
7. Lucian of Samosata, The Death of Peregrinus. ↩
8. Celsus, quoted by Origen in Contra Celsum 2.55: “[They say] that he rose again and showed the marks of his punishment … Who saw this? A half-frantic woman, as you say …” ↩
9. Augustine, De Dono Perseverantiae; City of God; On the Trinity; On Original Sin. See also Adolf von Harnack, History of Dogma, trans. Neil Buchanan (Boston: Little & Brown, 1901), vol. 5. ↩
10. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, above all Part I–II on grace and the moral law. See also Isma’il R. al Faruqi, Christian Ethics: A Historical and Systematic Analysis of Its Dominant Ideas (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1967), p. 208. ↩
11. Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, vol. I (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1958); John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Books II–III; and Commentary on Psalms. ↩
12. Adolf von Harnack, History of Dogma, trans. Neil Buchanan (Boston: Little & Brown, 1901), vol. 5. ↩
13. Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1963). ↩
14. Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944); see also The Sickness Unto Death and Fear and Trembling on dependence and the paradox of faith. ↩
15. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951–1963); and Kegley and Bretall (eds.), The Theology of Paul Tillich (New York: Macmillan, 1952). ↩
16. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. III, part 2, trans. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960); and Der Römerbrief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933). ↩
17. cf. Isma’il R. al Faruqi, Christian Ethics: A Historical and Systematic Analysis of Its Dominant Ideas (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1967), pp. 223–236. Al Faruqi traces this continuity of thought from Paul to Barth as the basis of what he terms Christianism. ↩
18. The Eastern Orthodox tradition refers to the theology and liturgy that developed among the Greek-speaking churches of the eastern Mediterranean, above all in Antioch, Asia Minor (Cappadocia) and Constantinople. It stresses mystical experience, purification of the soul and participation in the divine life (theosis). Chief figures in this continuity include Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–c. 395), who stressed unbounded spiritual progress (epektasis), and Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–c. 662), who developed a cosmic theology of the union of human will with the divine will through Christ. The approach differs from the Latin theology of the West, with its stress on legal systems, scholastic rationalism and inherited sin as developed by Augustine and Aquinas. ↩