The Religion of Peace

I’m sure YWAM and the Maryknollers also use the “Murder by Incineration and Rape by the Police” method of evangelization too. If you’ve seen one Abrahamic religion, you’ve seen ’em all.

Meanwhile, Phillip Pullman bravely pulls the noses of Christians, gets a few angry emails, and poses as St. Joan.

Ironies abound on the latter story. To begin with, there is the absurd notion that telling Pullman he is a blasphemer who risks the fires of hell is a “threat”. Sorry, but when a pagan tells me that Zeus is going to thrust me into Hades, I don’t regard that as a threat because Zeus doesn’t, you know, exist. For the same reason, I do not lie awake fretting about the wrath of the Easter Bunny or Quetzlcoatl. The real people who actually threaten are the people chronicled in my first link, about whom the brave Pullman has not one word to say, because he’s too busy courageously spray-painting obscenities on Anglican Churches and posing as a hero.

Also, ironic is the tired meme Pullman chooses to adopt about “Jesus the Good Man and the Scoundrel Christ” with its tired and utter outdated theory (outdated for people who actually know something about Scripture, I mean) that “Paul invented Christianity” and that Jesus was just a good egg whom the Evil Paul exaggerated into a god. The notion that Paul was effectively the first Pope and that the apostles believed nothing like what Paul believed has to be one of the most illiterate approaches to the New Testament in the history of crazy biblical readings. It shouldn’t offend Christians alone. It should offend anybody who can read.

And topping it off? Well, when you read the New Testament you discover that all those threats of hellfire that make Pullman feel so persecuted? They *all* come from the preaching of Jesus, not Paul.

Clues for the clueless: You cannot simultaneously declare that Paul complete revamped the image of Dead Rabbi Jesus into a god and then complain that Paul knows nothing of Jesus’ earthly career as it is recorded in the gospels. In fact, as I show in By What Authority?, you can reconstruct the basic outline of Jesus’ entire earthly career from the writings and preaching of Paul. He’s perfectly familiar with the material because he’s met the apostles and has been immersed in the Church’s liturgical tradition for years before he is sent into the world as the apostle Paul–by. the. Church (Acts 13). He himself is abundantly clear that he is passing on what he also received–meaning “received from the Church”. His very quarrels with Peter center, not on the fact that he is inventing a new religion that Peter never heard of, but on the fact that Peter is wimping out on living his own preaching. Paul, in short, is not the inventor of the Risen Christ. Nor is he the Leader of the Church. He has his gospel vetted by Peter, James and John.

The whole “Paul invented Christianity” thing is, like so much New Atheist Agitprop, just so *antique*. We heard all this stuff a hundred years ago.