Christians today claim that Paul belonged among the followers of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam ʿalayhi al-salām, peace be upon him and was responsible for spreading his teaching across the world. Yet much of the teaching in Paul’s writings contradicts what ʿĪsā ibn Maryam himself delivered. As Carl G. Jung put it:
This count applies the first rule of the measure, which rules out dissimulation: a message remade for each audience cannot correspond with a single reality.
It is frankly disappointing to see how Paul hardly ever allows the real Jesus of Nazareth to get a word in.1
To understand why Paul changed so much of the teaching of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam, look back at the historical circumstances.
The gods of the Gentiles #
Most of the foreign peoples of the region, neither Jews nor yet Christians, worshipped the ancient Greek and Roman gods: Jupiter, Zeus, Aphrodite, Apollo, Artemis and the rest. That world already knew the shape of the story Paul would tell. Alexander the Great let it be believed that he had a god for a father and a mortal for a mother, and the Hellenistic habit of syncretism treated the gods of one people as other names for the gods of another, so that a Greek could take the God of Jerusalem for Zeus under a different name.2
In the New Testament, Paul admits he was willing to do anything to win the Romans, the Gentiles still holding to pagan belief, over to his teaching. He kept compromising with them, and he reshaped the teaching of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam into a religion closely resembling Gentile belief: a faith built on God the Father, God the Son, a divine Savior and the like.
The Romans of the time believed that their gods had died on account of past sins and had been raised again. Paul taught that ʿĪsā ibn Maryam was the Son of God, and that this Son of God had died to redeem the sins of all humanity with his blood. The Gentiles began to see a plain resemblance between the two beliefs.
They had only to change a few names to bring them into line. In this way Paul persuaded the Greeks and other Gentiles to “accept” the religion of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam.3
Zeus and Hermes at Lystra #
When Barnabas and Paul arrived in Lycaonia and healed a lame man, word spread that the gods had come down in human form. Barnabas was called Zeus and Paul Hermes.4
The priests of Zeus brought oxen and garlands to the gates and prepared to sacrifice with the crowd.5 When Barnabas and Paul heard, they tore their clothes and ran toward the shouting crowd:
15καὶ λέγοντες· Ἄνδρες, τί ταῦτα ποιεῖτε; καὶ ἡμεῖς ὁμοιοπαθεῖς ἐσμεν ὑμῖν ἄνθρωποι, εὐαγγελιζόμενοι ὑμᾶς ἀπὸ τούτων τῶν ματαίων ἐπιστρέφειν ἐπὶ θεὸν ζῶντα ὃς ἐποίησεν τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ τὴν γῆν καὶ τὴν θάλασσαν καὶ πάντα τὰ ἐν αὐτοῖς·
15Men, why are you doing these things? We also are men, of like nature with you, and we bring you good news, that you should turn from these vain things to a living God, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them.6
The Greeks’ reaction, taking Barnabas and Paul for gods in human shape, shows the difficulty both men faced in spreading the teaching. The false belief reflects a failure to grasp the real teaching, and it was the chief obstacle to conveying the message of truth. Facing that misunderstanding, Barnabas and Paul may have been forced into a more strategic and cautious approach to overcome the deviant belief and widen the reach of their preaching.
Anyone who knows ʿĪsā ibn Maryam will recognize at once that his teaching continues that of Mūsā. To most idolaters it seemed new and foreign.
To the Greeks the picture of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam ran parallel to one of their own gods. Perhaps for that reason they accepted the teaching about ʿĪsā ibn Maryam more readily in that form, since Paul’s teaching, so presented, still left room to believe in more than one god.
The teaching of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam on tawḥīd (توحيد, “the oneness of God”) abolished belief in many gods, and that was the part they found hard to accept. For a man as sincere and steadfast as Barnabas, spreading the way of life ʿĪsā ibn Maryam taught in Greece without compromise with the pagan surroundings was a heavy task. Paul, who had already shown his readiness to alter what he knew, saw the opportunity of a modus vivendi with paganism: draw on the beliefs of the Greeks first, then fit them into the teaching of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam.
Greece by then was part of the Roman Empire. The Roman gods were, in essence, new versions of the Greek gods, and the resemblance deepened the roots of polytheism in society. Paul, known for his cunning, saw his chance in the theological confusion.
He understood that the common people’s attachment to Graeco-Roman religion, the fusion of Greek and Roman paganism, ran so deep that no preaching would succeed unless the original teaching of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam was fitted to their frame of belief. So the alteration of the message began, and with it the raison d’être of the new religion: acceptance by the Gentile.
All things to all men #
Paul created and introduced a new teaching adapted to the creed and way of life of the Greeks and other Gentiles. He was known for changing readily to suit a particular group. He said he could act as a Jew when among Jews and adapt himself to Gentiles when preaching to them.7
That approach contradicts the teaching of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam, who upheld the truth consistently and without compromise. He rejected religious leaders who cared only for popularity or personal gain, and he always reminded his followers to judge leaders by their “fruits,” the results of their actions.8 Paul practiced a strategy of moral flexibility that raises questions about the sincerity of his preaching.
In his letters he rarely refers to the teaching and life of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam. He concentrates instead on the post-crucifixion doctrine he himself introduced. That raises the question whether Paul knew the teaching and life of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam in any depth, or deliberately avoided the detail to assert his own theological authority.9
ʿĪsā ibn Maryam and Paul, side by side #
| ʿĪsā ibn Maryam | Paul |
|---|---|
| “Blessed are the peacemakers.” (Matthew 5:9) | “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.” (Romans 16:20) |
| “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.” (Mark 10:18) | “Who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped.” (Philippians 2:6) |
| “But if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” (Matthew 6:15) | “Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.” (Romans 5:9) |
| “On the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak.” (Matthew 12:36) | “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 8:1) |
| “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 7:21) | “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9) |
| “Go nowhere among the Gentiles … but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” (Matthew 10:5–6) | “From now on I will go to the Gentiles.” (Acts 18:6) |
| “And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven.” (Matthew 23:9) | “For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel.” (1 Corinthians 4:15) |
- Carl G. Jung, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 11, Psychology and Religion: West and East, trans. R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen Series XX (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), para. 228, p. 153. ↩
- Dale B. Martin, “The Greco-Roman World,” Lecture 3, RLST 152: Introduction to New Testament History and Literature, Open Yale Courses, Yale University, Spring 2009, https://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-152. ↩
- See Khadijah Mohd Khambali@Hambali and Adam Badhrulhisham, Konsep Triniti Menurut Agama Kristian (Melaka: Penerbit KUIM, 2022), pp. 170–171, on the adaptation of elements from the surrounding cults into Paul’s teaching to attract Gentile adherents. ↩
- Acts 14:12. ↩
- Acts 14:13. ↩
- Acts 14:15 (SBLGNT; ESV). ↩
- See 1 Corinthians 9:20–22. ↩
- Matthew 7:15–20. ↩
- Michael Gary Duncan, “The Curious Silence of the Dog and Paul of Tarsus: Revisiting The Argument from Silence,” Informal Logic, vol. 32, no. 1 (2012), pp. 98–115. ↩
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