This book is about our ethico/moral assumptions that are so widely shared they’re not even questioned – but that nonetheless might be false. These assumptions are what make Western Civilization Western Civilization. To investigate them is not to prefer other civilizations, but is only to understand our own. And in order to understand Western Civilization, one must accurately know the event that caused it, that shaped it.

Western Civilization – the shared civilization of all Christian-majority countries – started when the religion that defines it did. The moral base in each of these nations is Christianity; and, though different Western nations may vary in their respective interpretations of Christianity’s Scripture, that Scripture – the New Testament – is the source of the moral bases in all of these many countries. It’s what we all share. So, understanding what created the New Testament, is understanding the real source of our common moral base. We cannot comprehend the civilization in which we live, unless we know how the New Testament came about – the event that caused it – because the New Testament is the moral foundation for Western Civilization itself.

Some people erroneously think that Christianity is Jesus, not the New Testament. However, in reality, they know Jesus via the New Testament, which is the only part of the Bible that quotes him. Some non-biblical documents also contain quotations attributed to Jesus, but those alleged Jesus-statements are not part of Christianity, and therefore explaining what caused them is of no concern. Even if a person we think of as Jesus existed and uttered those statements, our world hasn’t been shaped by them, and so there will be no inquiry here into what caused the writing of those “words of Jesus.”

“The words of Jesus” that are in the Bible were not written by Jesus, but the Roman Catholic Church canonized them as representing what he said. The present book investigates to determine who actually wrote them, and why. The “why” turns out to be every bit as important as the “who” here, because this investigation finds that the people who wrote those words were followers of Paul, not followers of Jesus as they claimed. Of course, Paul himself claimed to be a follower of Jesus; but this investigation finds also that, in the later part of his career, when Paul wrote the letters by which he subsequently became known to history, he had, in fact, broken away from Jesus’s followers, and was competing against those people, no longer working for or with them. Paul’s followers were actually enemies of Jesus’s followers, and wrote the Gospels. They never met Jesus, and he would have been shocked and appalled at many of the quotations they attributed to him. These preachments being made in his name would have outraged him.

That’s a thumbnail sketch of my findings in this investigation which had started as a search to discover the event that created Christianity – the ultimate beginning of all this history. Originally, the purpose of this book was, indeed, to find and describe this singular event; but, in order to do that, it was necessary at the very start to re-define this goal concretely or operationally, as discovering the precise sequence of circumstances that had caused the New Testament to be written as it is. My process here was thus inevitably one of working backwards in time from the New Testament documents to their ultimate cause, which couldn’t be merely an individual (either Jesus or anyone else) but which would instead necessarily have to be that individual (whomever it was) acting within the context of the precise circumstances that had motivated him to do this momentous act, an act which has since turned out to be the most important one in all of human history: namely, the creation of Christianity. Finding the event, that created the Christian faith, was, indeed, my aim at this investigation’s start, and it remained my objective after the question was thus concretely defined. This question drove me because I’m an investigative historian, and because I thought that scientifically reconstructing, from the available evidence, the event that created Christianity, was the most important objective an investigative historian can possibly pursue. This is why I undertook to find: What happened at this event – who did it, when, where, how, and why?

For an investigative historian, this challenge is like Mount Everest. George Mallory, when asked why he tried to climb the world’s highest peak, said famously, “Because it’s there.” The only way to do such a thing is step by step, and many people think that reaching a peak like this is impossible. So, I invite you to take this trip now along with me, step by step, to experience for yourself the scaling of history’s peak.

This book will answer all of these questions (who, when, where, how, and why) in such detail, you’ll become like a fly on the wall, present at the occasion when Western Civilization itself started. This event wasn’t like anyone today would imagine. It will surprise everyone. New scientific methodology has made its discovery possible – at last, after 2,000 years, excavating from ancient documents the actual circumstances that caused these documents to be created as they are; so that, for the first time ever, they scientifically make sense. However, what these documents scientifically tell us, isn’t what they seem to tell. The truth behind them is a lot more interesting than the myth in front of them. And the path to this truth doesn’t pass through an assumption that that myth is true. Nor through an assumption that it’s false. This path passes through no such assumptions, whatsoever. Where other paths assume, this path instead investigates.

According to Matthew 16:18, Jesus said to Peter, “You, Peter, are the rock upon which I will build my church.” However, scholars widely question the authenticity of this alleged quotation;¹ and many scholars (even some who don’t question its authenticity) question the meaning of this statement, since the Greek term, “ekklesia,” which was used there for “church,” signified, in that time, any sort of an assembly, even a political one; and a Jewish assembly (or – as it was then called – “sunagoge” or else “synagoge”) was also a type of “ekklesia.” Did Jesus start a Jewish sect – a synagogue, or assembly of Jews? Christianity isn’t that. Moreover, a few chapters earlier in Matthew, 10:5-6 quotes Jesus as telling his disciples, “Don’t go to the Gentiles, … but only to the lost sheep of Israel,” and then again in 15:24, Jesus is quoted as saying, about himself, “I was sent [by God] to only the lost sheep of Israel.” Thus, this “ekklesia” – relating to those verses at least – would have constituted Jesus’s synagogue, unless God subsequently changed his mind and his instructions to Jesus, to start a new religion. Furthermore, if the intent in 16:18 was to start a religion, the word for that would have been “threskeia,” not “ekklesia.” But this “Jesus” didn’t start any “threskeia”; he didn’t start a religion. Therefore, 16:18, even if it was authentic (which is in doubt), fails to answer the key question: Who started Christianity – and when, where, how, and why?

The only other Scriptural candidate for Jesus’s having authorized Christianity is Matthew 28:18-20, in which the resurrected Jesus is quoted as reversing the command of the living Jesus (in 10:5-6), by commanding his disciples, “Go throughout the world to make all peoples my disciples by baptizing them in the name of [the Trinity] the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” However, this command directly contradicts Matthew 5:17-20, which quotes Jesus as saying “Do not think I have come to do away with the Law of Moses, … for it will be eternally binding.” The first three of the “eternally binding” Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:3-7, and Deuteronomy 5:7-11), given from God to Moses and all of God’s people, ban permanently any such thing as the Trinity, and demand worshipping only the Father, never to include any second object.² Even more emphatically, the Third of these Ten Commandments says “Do not take the name of God in vain.” Thus, the alleged resurrectional baptismal command of 28:18-20 (in the name of the Trinity) would have been clearly in violation of those “eternally binding” commandments from God. In addition, Matthew quotes Jesus in 19:16-19 as saying “Obey the commandments if you want to win eternal life,” and as specifically citing some of the Ten Commandments as examples of what one must do in order to go to heaven. Furthermore, the early Christian church didn’t consider 28:18-20 to be itself binding, and as late as the 16th Century that statement was widely understood as having been directed only at Jesus’s disciples in his own time, not at future generations, and the obligation was thought to have been fulfilled by them. In any case, this statement doesn’t assert that a person who fails to comply with it will be viewed less favorably by God, or denied salvation. Moreover, only relatively recently did this alleged statement come to be called “The Great Commission,” and considered as the start of Christianity. That change of belief occurred at the time critical scholarship on the Bible first emerged, The Enlightenment. It’s not how Christianity had seen itself during the religion’s first 1,600 years. On top of all this, the oldest of the four Gospels, Mark, had no equivalent passage. It ended at Mark 16:8. Later (after the two most ancient manuscripts of Mark, both of which date from the Fourth Century and both of which ended at 16:8), some anonymous person added the current ending (16:9-20), which copies and expands Matthew 28:18-20. Thus, “The Great Commission” was apparently concocted long after Mark was written. What’s the likelihood the earliest-written Gospel would have omitted this statement (which Matthew alleged to be Jesus’s last) if it was authentic – if Jesus had actually said this? Would Mark have ignored such a statement? And, in addition: This earliest-written of all the four canonical Gospel accounts of “Jesus,” Mark, at its passage 12:29-30, quotes “Jesus” as saying outright, “The most important commandment of all is that the Lord God is one and must be loved with your entire being,” which statement paraphrases the First Commandment, virtually identically to the way Moses did in Deuteronomy 10:12, and thus this “Jesus” prohibits belief in the Trinity; so, the reason why Mark included no “Great Commission” (until some anonymous person added it centuries later) is obvious: everyone in the time when Mark was written knew that Jesus would never have said such a thing.

Finally regarding Matthew 28:18-20, Moses is quoted in Deuteronomy 10:20 as saying that God told him to tell everyone, “Worship only Him. … Make promises only in His Name.” Contrast that with the statement alleged from Jesus at the end of Matthew, 28:19-20, “Go then to all peoples everywhere, and baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and teach them to obey all my commands.” This supposed “Son” isn’t merely telling his followers to violate the Father’s command “Worship only Him,” but to violate the Father’s command “Make promises only in His Name.” This “Jesus” is moreover telling his followers to obey the “commands” of the Son, even though those “commands” violate the first three of the Ten Commandments from the Father. And yet this “Son” also supposedly said (as was earlier noted) in Matthew 5:17-20, “Do not think I have come to do away with the Law of Moses, … for it will be eternally binding.” So, yet again, the author of the first-written Gospel, Mark, had good reason for not alleging that Jesus claimed to have overridden any of God’s commandments: unlike the authors of Matthew, Luke, and John, the author of Mark wasn’t writing late enough to be able to get away with so blatant a fabrication.

Thus, no evidence whatsoever exists that Jesus started Christianity.

If Jesus didn’t create Christianity, if a different person created it, then would Jesus have approved of what that individual was doing? Might Christianity even have been created by an enemy of Jesus? But why would an enemy of Jesus have produced a myth that “Jesus” was a god, who should be worshipped? Wouldn’t any enemy of Jesus be, to the exact contrary, extremely disinclined to do such a thing?

All that’s clear here, at the outset, is that the event that created Christianity – whoever did it, whatever it was, and wherever it occurred – was the most important event in all of human history, because the world 2,000 years later has been so profoundly affected by it. If Christianity had not been created, then the world today would be so different that it would be unrecognizable.

Try, if you can, to visualize the world without Christianity: you’ll quickly realize that it would be a very different place, EVEN in Muslim lands.

Islam, after all, is based upon the Quran, and the Quran accepts both the Old Testament and the New. (See, for examples, Quran verses 2:31, 2:85, 2:136-7, 3:03, 4:47, 4:136-7, 10:37, 10:94, 21:7, 29:46, 35:31, and 41:9-12.) The New Testament is itself the DISTINCTIVE PRODUCT of Christianity’s founding event, and so Islam would be very different if this event had not taken place.

Jews, too, have been immensely affected by it: for more than 1,500 years, they’ve been surrounded by Christian culture, and their lives have been largely shaped by it.

Thus, on a global basis, not just in the Christian realm, this event has emerged as our culture’s very kernel, an essential reality, for virtually all of humanity.

In other words, by creating the world’s largest religion, this event has shaped the lives of practically everyone today, all the way down to our cultural roots, so that humanity could be said to be virtually sleepwalking through our days and years with this occurrence constantly in the invisible background, unheralded and unrecognized, not even discussed, but still always present, guiding us unknowingly in what we do and have done, throughout our entire wakeful, conscious, lives.

Furthermore, for Christians, this event doesn’t concern just a person’s ritual behaviors, such as going to mass, or crossing one’s heart. Even though we’re ignorant of this event’s existence, every Christian’s ethical-moral viewpoint is ROOTED, ultimately, in this single historical occasion, which was the conception of Christianity.

As will be made clear in the later part of this book, this event also transformed, throughout the Christian-majority areas of the world, the relationships between law and morality, and between Church and State, and thus profoundly shaped the political world that we live in today. Politics is the very opposite of the ritual sphere; and yet, politics, just as much as religious ritual per se, has been transformed by this single event.

Though many people assume that if an event is historically important, the event must be known to the public, this assumption is sometimes false, because things that occur in secret, or that are known to only a restricted number of people, can occasionally have an enormous impact – sometimes even bigger than the impact of any famous event. The present book documents and describes one such private event, which occurred 2,000 years ago, and which has never even been publicly recognized until now: the event that created Christianity.

Since the news of this event will be coming only now, two millennia after the fact, this news might shock believing Christians (people who believe the Bible). These readers’ concerns should be specifically addressed here, and now will be. (Readers who don’t find the following of interest might prefer to skip ahead here, straight to the Introduction.)

A well-established central finding of psychological research, concerning “confirmation bias” or “motivated reasoning” (which are two phrases referring to people’s tendency to believe whatever they want to believe, regardless of any contrary facts), is that individuals evaluate whatever they read according to their pre-existing ideas about the given subject. Specifically, psychologists have found that people tend to pay attention to whatever confirms their existing ideas, and tend to ignore whatever contradicts those pre-established beliefs.³ This tendency most people have (though the research studies make clear also that some rare individuals do not possess this unfortunate tendency), to reinforce their beliefs, even in the face of contrary evidence – even in the face of contrary evidence that disproves those beliefs – has been found to be especially strong if a person is conservative in his/her beliefs (such as the studies show that most people are who think Jesus started Christianity).⁴

That research explains why most people interpret the Bible (or any other writing) in whatever way they want. A typical example of this phenomenon is the issue of rich and poor, in the Bible. Some people (usually conservatives) interpret the Bible as indicating that the rich are especially blessed by God, while others (usually liberals) interpret it as indicating that the poor are especially blessed by God. The Bible actually supports and contradicts both views, as the following shows:

On the side of the rich, are these biblical passages:

In Matthew 10:24, “Jesus” says: “A student is never superior to the teacher, just as a slave is never superior to the slave-master. It is sufficient for the student to aspire to become a teacher, and for the slave to aspire to become a slavemaster.” This “Jesus” accepts slavery, and also accepts the rights of slave-masters.⁵

In Matthew 13:12, “Jesus” directly instructs his disciples, that, in the Kingdom of Heaven, “The person who has something will be given still more, until he possesses more than enough; but the person who has nothing will find even that taken away from him.”

In Matthew 25:29-30, “Jesus” tells a parable of the Kingdom of Heaven, a realm where: “To every person who has something, even more will be given, until he possesses more than enough; but the person who has nothing will find even that taken away from him. And unproductive slaves will be thrown outside into the darkness, where there is want and weeping.”

In 2 Thessalonians 3:10, “Paul” says: “Whoever refuses to work must not be permitted to eat.”

On the side of the poor, are these passages:

In Matthew 6:24, “Jesus” says: “No one can serve … both God and wealth.”

In Matthew 19:21, “Jesus” says: “If you wish to be perfect, sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor.”

In Matthew 19:24, “Jesus” says: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.”

In Luke 6:20, “Jesus” says: “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is God’s Kingdom.”

In Luke 6:24, “Jesus” says: “Woe to you rich, for you have already received your comfort.”

Thus, in order to understand the will of Jesus, or otherwise to carry out God’s will, one must actually first discard one’s ego, so as to avoid believing merely what one wants to believe. One must start this quest by accepting the reality that the Bible contradicts itself. Rather than merely assert “The Bible says” this or that (as is usually done), one must open-mindedly seek a coherent, non-self-contradictory, explanation of its self-contradictions. The alternative – to choose this or that side of a given biblical contradiction (such as rich/poor) – is only to follow one’s own will, not to follow the will of God (if God exists). Whoever does that, carries out solely his personal preference, whenever the Bible contradicts itself – as it often does.

A primary purpose here will be precisely this: to explain the Bible’s contradictions, and not merely to endorse this or that – and to oppose that or this – in the Bible. Explaining the Bible’s contradictions entails indicating where these contradictions came from. The basic belief of Christianity is that the entire New Testament comes from God and Christ, but the present work does not confirm this belief; to the contrary: it disconfirms Christianity, by scientifically finding that the New Testament was actually created by enemies of the Jewish sect that Jesus had started.

For this reason, fundamentalist Christians will tend to ignore the findings here. However, if this work is true, then it is fulfilling the intention of Jesus, who has thus already been misrepresented for two thousand years, and who would definitely not wish to continue being so misrepresented. In a situation such as this, Jesus would want every Christian to read and consider the present work, because he would oppose misrepresentations of himself, and he would thus want any such misrepresentations to be exposed. Consequently, a fundamentalist Christian, who presumably wishes to follow the will of Jesus, is obligated by his commitment to Jesus, to keep an open mind to the possibility that Jesus is misrepresented in the New Testament. And, if this work turns out instead to be false; and if Jesus did, after all, start Christianity (and so himself said both sides of the contradictions that the New Testament attributes to him); then the reader, after finding a falsehood in this work which discredits this work, will have thereby come to know Christianity’s truthfulness with even higher certainty than before, as a direct outcome of having found such a falsehood in the most rigorous case against Christianity. In that case, the contradictions that are attributed to Jesus came from Jesus. Even if this means that Christianity is morally ambivalent, Christianity’s basic belief is confirmed. The belief that Jesus advocated Christianity will then have survived its stiffest test; and, to paraphrase Matthew 16:19, even the gates of hell will then not be able to hold out against Christianity’s truth. However, you cannot make this judgment unless you have first considered this case.

In either eventuality, the will of Jesus will have been served, and the truth will win out. As John 8:32 says, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” What you believe after you’ve been freed will depend upon what you find in this search.

However, even at the present stage, this much is clear, and it’s substantial: The words of “Jesus” in the New Testament contradict themselves on core issues, such as rich and poor, and the Trinity itself. Such self-contradiction insults Jesus (if he existed – and the investigation presented here will confirm that he did, and that scholars who allege otherwise haven’t put forth a single valid argument for their position). A “Jesus” like that is obviously not worth taking seriously, much less worshipping (if he even intended to be worshipped). He is his own opponent, on important matters. What would the real Jesus think of a self-styled “Christian” who cares so little about the alleged religion that “Christian” holds, as not to investigate whether those words, and the other words attributed to Jesus in the New Testament, misrepresent what he said, and what he stood for; and as to care so little about whether these words might even have been placed into Jesus’s mouth by Jesus’s actual enemies? If an alleged believer doesn’t care enough about the religion he professes, so as to investigate whether its Scripture lies about the person’s very object of worship and basic beliefs, then what would Jesus – or anyone else – think of such an individual? That’s yet another reason to consider this investigation.

This work is written for anyone who seeks a scientific investigation of Christanity. If its findings are true, Jesus would passionately want Christians to read it. If its findings are false, Jesus wouldn’t care whether Christians read it, because the self-contradictions that the New Testament attribute to Jesus would then reflect Jesus, not distortions of him by enemies, and such a Jesus would nullify himself.

Jesus of Nazareth started a new sect in Judaism. He was then crucified by the Romans in approximately the year 30. The Romans crucified him because he claimed to be the King of the Jews. The Romans crucified everyone who made that claim (there were others who made this same claim). All of these men were crucified because the Romans had appointed solely the Herodian family to that kingly position. For anyone else to claim this title was automatically viewed as being – and it actually was – sedition against Rome. This is why Jesus was crucified by the Romans, for sedition. (Though the Gospels say that Jesus was crucified for violating Jewish blasphemy laws, that was a lie, as will be documented and explained in this work.)

Jews were at that time a conquered people, who had lost their independent nation of Israel, and who were being ruled by these kings appointed by Rome. Moreover, Jesus taught that the Law came from God, not from Rome’s Emperor or Caesar, and this made his sedition especially threatening to Rome’s continued rule over Jews.

Consequently, if for no other reason, Rome actually had little other choice but to crucify Jesus, as a public example and warning to any Jew who might similarly challenge Rome’s authority to make the laws, and to appoint the kings.

Furthermore, according to Josephus’s Antiquities 18:2:2, Rome appointed not merely the Jews’ kings but also the chief Jewish priest, in Jerusalem, Caiaphas. If Caiaphas advised his people to tell (his actual employer) Pilate to kill Jesus, as is alleged in John 18:14, then this wouldn’t have been done “so that one man should die for all the people,” as that Gospel alleged, but instead done to halt and block any spread of such sedition. And it also wouldn’t have been done to suppress “blasphemy” against Jewish laws, as is alleged in Matthew 26:65 and Mark 14:64. Pilate’s job wasn’t to assure “that one man should die for all the people,” nor to suppress blasphemy against Judaism; it was simply to crush sedition. Moreover, Jesus did not blaspheme against Judaism; he taught Judaism; he was, in fact, a recognized rabbi. He never abandoned Judaism. The idea that he did was created, starting twenty years after his death, by enemies of the sect that he had established.

Jesus’s disciples were followers of this convict who had been executed by Rome for sedition. Rome was wary of them.

Furthermore, Jesus’s disciples were poor people, not serving or affiliated with the owners of most wealth, the ruling Roman authorities.

This historical background is essential in order to understand why Jesus’s remaining followers, in Jerusalem, were vulnerable both politically and economically.

Shortly before Jesus’s crucifixion, he appointed his brother James to head the young sect. (Though the Gospels say that Jesus appointed Peter as the group’s new leader; this, too, was an intentional falsehood, documented and explained herein.) James took over leadership of this Jewish sect. Within approximately three years after Jesus’s crucifixion, Paul joined the sect. Then, three years after joining, Paul traveled to Jerusalem, in order to receive missionary training specifically from Peter, who was the sect’s chief missionary selling this sect to Gentiles, or to non-Jews.

Peter had had only modest success converting Gentiles to join this Jewish sect, but Paul became the star missionary or salesman to the Gentiles. In fact, Paul brought in such a great number of new members, so that soon most of the sect’s members were actually Gentiles who had been converted to Judaism by Paul.

As the years went by and Paul brought more and more Gentiles into this sect throughout the Roman Empire, he was bringing into the sect a wealthier and less threatening-to-Rome class of members, people who hadn’t been raised to believe that God and not Rome was the ultimate arbiter of the laws. Paul collected funds from these higher-social-status people to maintain and support the very weak-status disciples in Jerusalem. Consequently these disciples grew increasingly dependent upon Paul.

However, this soaring number of new members who hadn’t been born as Jews created a problem for the members who had been so born: These new Jews weren’t circumcised. According to the Jewish legend, which as Jews they all believed to be history and not myth, Judaism had started at Genesis 17:12-14, with God telling Abraham: “Circumcision will be your signature on our agreement [God’s agreement with the Jews], a physical sign that our covenant is eternal.” In Genesis 17:14, God said: “No man who is uncircumcised will be one of my people.” God’s agreement was thus only with circumcised men; no uncircumcised man would be one of God’s people. Then, in Genesis 17:19, God made clear that this would never change; he said: “This agreement will extend through all future generations – everlasting.” Abraham complied, and thus the Jewish covenant began, according to the Jewish legend. In ancient cultures, and in cultures that are pre-literate or maybe just becoming literate, “signing” a contract (like the contract with God, which is the Jewish covenant) was sometimes done “in blood”; and the signature in this case was done on a private part of a man’s body, a part which moreover represented the future; it represented coming generations: the penis.

So, the question is: were these new men, whom Paul had brought in, actually Jews? Not according to the commandment that started Judaism: they certainly weren’t. Circumcision was Judaism’s signature commandment; a man didn’t even qualify to be a Jew unless he had first signed the covenant with God by becoming circumcised, and Paul’s men had not signed. This was in black and white, in Genesis. It was undeniable.

By the time of the 17th year of Paul’s employment with the sect, 14 years after his first visit to Jerusalem, Paul’s congregations included so many members, that James called Paul back again to Jerusalem. In Galatians 2:2, Paul said that what was at stake in this Jerusalem conference was the success or failure of all of his missionary work up to that time. The crucial moment for him had finally come.

If circumcision were to be imposed upon his men, Paul would have lost almost all of them, and the reason for this was quite simple:

Anesthesia didn’t yet exist, and therefore any medical operation was a living terror. This is why few medical operations occurred that weren’t absolutely necessary. The circumcisions of male Jewish infants on their eighth day, in accord with Genesis 17:11, were exceptions. Those infants didn’t even choose it; this was something that their parents did to them. Paul’s converts, by contrast, were grown men. They would have been terrified to be subjected to that requirement. Most would have refused.

In addition, antibiotics and antiseptics didn’t exist; germs weren’t even known to exist; the microscope hadn’t yet been invented. Consequently, the death-rate in any type of operation was very high, due to infections. When death occurred to an infant, it was no major concern, because infants possessed no property, and thus no power. But adult males possessed all the property, and so all the power in society, and therefore Paul knew that he would lose his life’s success if he demanded that his men become circumcised.

All scholars have ignored these determinative realities about circumcision during the First Century, and many scholars have even said that circumcision was only a small concern to those of Jesus’s followers who were trying to convert uncircumcised adult males. For example, Harvard’s Krister Stendahl said (in his 1963 Paul Among Jews and Gentiles, Part 6) that “circumcision … was not a barrier to Christianity but quite attractive to Gentiles, who were enamored of what was Oriental. … Even ritual laws like those from the Old Testament were not a liability but an asset – as any reader of Galatians can see.” He provided no documentation for that opinion regarding circumcision, because none exists: You’ll be investigating Galatians yourself in the pages here to follow, and you won’t find anything in Galatians to support this commonly held scholarly opinion of the innocuousness (if not attractiveness) of circumcision during the First Century – nothing whatsoever there. Scholars don’t have to document their opinions, because (unfortunately), even without evidence, scholars are deemed to possess authority of their own. Only scientists are obliged to cite evidence for their views. (We’re not doing it here in this Summary, but we do it throughout the rest. Even a scientist may summarize.)

James understood that if he demanded that Paul’s men become circumcised, then he’d lose most of his members; and so James, too, didn’t want to do that. Furthermore (as has been noted), Jesus’s disciples were poor people; they were Jerusalem Jews, who had been defeated by Rome, and almost all of the rich people were associated with the Roman regime, and they were Gentiles – uncircumcised. Paul’s congregations were thus contributing money to the upkeep of these poor Jews in Jerusalem. James strongly wanted this financial assistance to continue.

Paul wrote in Galatians 2:10 that at the conclusion of the conference James required only that this money keep coming. Paul seemed, at first, to have had his way.

But then, only shortly after Paul returned to Antioch, Peter came, and, later that same day, other agents from James also came, and they told Paul that James had changed his mind, and that Paul’s men would have to be circumcised, after all. According to Paul’s account in Galatians 2:14-21, Paul responded by saying that the covenant was at an end as a result of Jesus’s crucifixion, and that “a person is viewed favorably by God only by means of possessing Christ-faith, never by following God’s laws [which are set forth in the covenant in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible].” In other words, Paul said that the agreement that God had with the Jews was now replaced by Paul’s “gospel of Christ,” in which a faith that Jesus was the Messiah is all that God requires, in order for a man to become one of God’s people and so go to heaven instead of to hell after death. Paul said, in Galatians 2:21, “If a person is put right with God by adhering to the covenant, then the Messiah died for nothing!”

That was the first time this doctrine, Christianity’s basic doctrine, personal salvation by means of faith instead of by the Jewish means (which is via obeying God’s commandments), had been stated anywhere. It occurred in the year 49 or 50. That’s the occasion when Christianity actually started: the doctrinal break away from Judaism, the creation of Paul’s gospel of Christ. Paul was virtually forced into it, by circumstances, or else he would fail in life; his entire prior 17 years as the sect’s best salesman would have gone down the drain, if he had required his men to go under the knife. In Philippians 3:1-2, he warned his men, “As I’ve said before, I am concerned about your safety,” because “those evil people, those dogs, who insist upon cutting the body,” are wrong, and (Philippians 3:8) the entire covenant is “garbage” (or “dung”), which the Messiah’s death has made superfluous. Judaism was here trashed.

Paul knew that discarding circumcision meant discarding the covenant to which it signed. (A contract doesn’t exist unless it’s accepted; and, according to Genesis 17:10-14, God’s contract wasn’t accepted unless it was signed via circumcision.) But Paul couldn’t afford to tell his men that he was rejecting the covenant on account of rejecting the circumcision requirement – and that he wasn’t really, as Paul claimed, rejecting the circumcision law on account of rejecting the covenant. Paul understood that, if he were to say to his men, “I reject the covenant because I reject the circumcision law,” then his phenomenally successful sales career would end. He would be confessing his own fraud. His followers would reject his fraud, and he’d soon have no followers. An honest statement of his concerns here would have transformed him from a success to a failure in his own eyes, because of this loss of his followers. He would have told them, in effect: For you to be a member of the Jesus (or, indeed, of any) sect of Judaism, you must first become circumcised, because no uncircumcised man is one of God’s people; no uncircumcised man is a Jew at all. They would have left not only Judaism but also his congregations, in order to avoid the terror and danger of an operation. So, Paul never told them this.

Galatians 2:11-21 presents an embarrassed and nervous Paul recounting to the Galatians the event that had actually started Christianity (as noted, he couldn’t afford to admit to them that this occasion was its start); and, in this account, Peter simply lacked the stomach to inform Paul of the bad news from James. Peter instead sat down to dinner at Paul’s headquarters, with Paul’s uncircumcised followers. Then, James’s backup team suddenly arrived, and saw that Peter was dining with Paul’s uncircumcised men, not telling Paul that they needed to become circumcised before they could be authentic followers of Jesus. Peter backed away from the table and seconded James’s demand. This precipitated the blow-up, which caused Paul to assert 2:16-21 – Christianity.

Paul, in Galatians, didn’t mention that James had changed his mind and had decided that Genesis 17:14 needed to be imposed after all in order for Paul’s men to continue being members of the Jesus sect of Jews. Paul simply couldn’t bring himself to admit this, because if his Galatian readers were to be informed that the sect’s leader, James, now demanded circumcision, then those Galatians would be made conscious that by their staying in Paul’s congregations they’d no longer be members of the Jesus sect, and they’d then abandon both James and Paul. They’d abandon the Jesus sect on account of refusing to go under the knife in an era without anesthesia, antibiotics, and antiseptics; and they’d abandon Paul’s congregations because they’d know that Paul’s congregations were in violation of Jesus, and weren’t even Jewish at all; they’d learn that this was really just a hoax. (The case presented in this work will be that Paul perpetrated not just an “error” but a hoax when he created Christianity – that he was intending to deceive; that his deceptions here were the result of careful planning and scheming, not of mere sloppiness on his part. That will be our case.)

Paul and James were now locked in the equivalent of a bad marriage that couldn’t be ended. Divorce was too painful for either to carry out. If James were to announce publicly that Paul’s men were no longer his followers, then James’s poverty-stricken group in Jerusalem would no longer continue to receive the financial contributions coming in from Paul’s far better-off Gentile congregations throughout the rest of the Roman Empire. James’s desperate followers had simply become financially too dependent upon the far larger number of Paul’s followers. Thus, James remained quiet about his change-of-mind. And Paul, for his part, continued telling his followers to continue contributing to the group in Jerusalem, because Paul needed the at-least-tacit acceptance by James’s group to continue for a long enough time for Paul’s new faith to be able to go out ultimately publicly on its own, as an entirely new religion, abandoning its Jewish status. If Paul were to become publicly known as being no longer Jewish, then his claim to be a follower of the Messiah would be blatantly fraudulent, since no non-Jewish context yet existed for even the very concept of the Messiah (“Christ”). Paul walked a fine line: he had to preach a new religion, by using terms that seemed to his contemporaries to be consistent with an established religion, when he was actually negating the latter.

James’s group faded away. But Paul’s blossomed and thrived. One reason why Paul’s group grew was that Paul was telling people that they don’t need to go under the knife in order to win an eternity in heaven; just Christ-faith (as described in Galatians 2:16-21) will do the job. In other words, Paul said that God changed everything after Jesus’s crucifixion, so that heaven was now on sale at a far lower price than in Judaism. No longer did one have to follow Jewish Law in order to go to heaven, but now mere faith in Jesus’s being the Christ was sufficient.

Another reason Paul’s group grew was that in Romans 13:1-7 and elsewhere, Paul and his followers told their followers that the laws they should adhere to weren’t the ones from Judaism’s God, but were instead the ones from the Roman Emperor of the time. Romans 13:1-7 and other passages presented Rome’s Emperors as, in effect, God’s agents upon Earth, imposing God’s will, and legislating on God’s behalf, so that, as Romans 13:5 put it, “You must obey the political authority [the Emperor] not just because, as God’s agent, he’ll punish you for violating the law, but also as a matter of conscience.” This teaching by Paul and his followers was enormously helpful to the Emperors; it served as a huge inducement for Emperors ultimately to impose Christianity throughout their realm.

When it’s understood that the four canonical Gospel accounts of Christ were written not by Jesus’s followers but by Paul’s, both the truths and the lies in the New Testament become fully explained, and make 100% sense. Even the NT’s internal contradictions now make sense, without any exception whatsoever.⁷ Reality makes sense; only myths do not.

Paul, in his account in Galatians 2, had been faced with an extraordinarily painful choice: either he would carry out his instructions from James and demand that his perhaps thousands of men become circumcised, or else he and his congregations would leave the sect and go off into the future as an entirely new religion, which renounces the Jewish covenant (wherein, following God’s laws is a person’s pathway to an afterlife in heaven), and which replaces that by Paul’s Christian “gospel of Christ” (in which Christ-faith is Paul’s new pathway to heaven). Replacing Judaism – Jesus’s own religion – would be traitorous to Jesus. But remaining Jewish would have led here to Paul’s oblivion, because few of Paul’s men were willing to risk their lives (via circumcision) in order to stay with him. Paul took the path to his personal success, rather than to his personal oblivion. This is what caused Paul to start an entirely new religion, which was custom-tailored by him to become the world’s largest, because it placed heaven on sale, and also because it created for the Roman Emperors a new universal or “Catholic” religion to replace the old parochial and merely local Roman gods.

Already before Paul’s time, the Emperors had been struggling with the inadequacies of their old religion: the Roman gods provided no moral authority for the laws the Emperors dictated; and these gods were also purely local tribal Roman deities, who possessed no authority outside of Rome anyway. Paul’s solution to both of these pressing problems provided the only way to make the Emperors’ subjects – not just in Rome but elsewhere, throughout the Empire – follow the Emperors’ commands as if those commands came from God. (E.g.: Romans 13:1-5.) This solution emerged to become a powerful inducement for the Emperors ultimately to adopt Christianity.

However, in order for Paul and his followers who wrote the Gospels to win support from the Emperors, a way also had to be found to explain Jesus’s crucifixion by the Roman authorities. After all, no Roman Emperor would ever endorse a religion that worshipped a man who was acknowledged to have been executed by one of the Emperor’s own predecessors. Paul and his followers came up with a solution to this problem, too: They alleged that the Jews (despite having been conquered by the Romans) somehow (and they didn’t say how) managed to force the supposedly reluctant Roman authorities to crucify Jesus for “blasphemy” against Jewish Law. This lie didn’t only present in a frighteningly bad light the very thing (Jewish Law) that Paul in Galatians 2:16, Romans 3:28, and elsewhere, had said that God was now abandoning in favor of Paul’s gospel, Christ-faith. More to the point here, this lie freed the Roman Emperors from any Deicide charge, that they had killed God. Without this lie, Paul and his people would have stood no chance at all of ultimately winning over the Emperors.

Thus, securing his support from both the mass base and the Imperial elite, Paul emerged to become the most powerful person in history, the creator of the world’s largest religion, just as he hoped. Paul said, in 1 Corinthians 9:24-25, “Run life’s race so as to win the prize.” For him, winning was everything. “Every athlete in training submits to strict discipline in order to win a prize that will not last; we, however, do it to win a prize that will last forever.” And so he did: his prize has already lasted 2,000 years.

The people who penned the four canonical Gospel accounts of “Christ” wrote into his mouth words expressing the agenda of Paul, not necessarily of Jesus.

And that’s how the moral base of Western Civilization was created: as a hoax.⁸ This is how Paul dealt with a threat that would otherwise have destroyed what had been, up till the moment, his phenomenally successful 17-year-long career: he overcame it in the only way that was even possible. Moreover, subsequent millennia have demonstrated that his career not merely succeeded, but that it turned out to have been the most successful career ever, because the organization he thereby started became the largest in history, just as he was hoping it would.

Even the Trinity, and the Resurrection, are fully understandable, and will be explained in the following pages, as outcomes from this decision by Paul. (That is to say: those beliefs were essential to the success of Paul’s hoax; and this is why he introduced them, and it’s why his followers fleshed them out in their narratives about “Jesus.”)

Even the word-choices by Paul, and by his followers who wrote the four canonical Gospel accounts of “Jesus,” were carefully calculated by them to fool future generations, and not only their own. For example (as was previously noted), they presented their “Jesus” as having established an “ekklesia” (which is today translated as “church,” though it actually meant in their own time any kind of an assembly, which could also have included its being a synagogue or “sunagoge”) rather than as his having established (as they might otherwise have called it) either a “threskeia” (meaning a religion – which would have made their hoax obvious to their own generation, since everyone in their time knew that Jesus hadn’t started any religion), or else a “sunagoge” (which would have made their hoax obvious to future generations, such as to ours, since future generations weren’t intended to know that Jesus had lived and died as a devout Jew). Paul was the source of all of these brilliant tricks. (E.g., the decision to refer to Jesus’s organization as an ekklesia, and not as a sunagoge or threskeia, predates the canonical Gospels: “ekklesia” is the term Paul used in all seven of his authentic letters.)

Some supporters of religion might consider this to be too harsh an account of the creation of the Christian faith. However, the actual distinction between this account and all others isn’t its harshness, but rather its methodological foundation: namely, that this account is based upon a legal/forensic analysis of the evidence.

This history of the origins of the hoax we recognize as Christianity is documented with full details in the following, in which the people who created that hoax wrote and displayed not only their hoax, but also – under the first-ever legal/forensic analysis of their writings – how and why they did it. Without necessarily assuming their testimony to be honest, but rather “cross-examining” this testimony by placing it under a legal/forensic logical microscope, which exposes both the overtly explicit and the logically implied assertions in these documents, and which distinguishes between these two levels of assertion, this history becomes revealed with stunning clarity, as we shall now see, starting with the first-ever legal/forensic analysis of the most reliable of the Christian scriptures, Galatians, in which Paul exhibits far more than he asserts, and in which his testimony even demonstrates/proves some things that outright contradict, and that thus disprove, some of his claims.⁹

“O, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!”
Sir Walter Scott, 1808, Marmion, Canto VI, Stanza 17

This book’s thesis is that Paul’s letter to the Galatians describes not just the event that created Christianity, but also what led up to and caused this event, and also what this event’s immediate consequences were – including the changes it caused in Paul’s teachings about Jesus’s life and death. Consequently, the first three chapters here are devoted to a legal/forensic analysis of this single item of evidence, Galatians.

What you will be experiencing here is like what jurors in a major white-collar-crime trial experience when documentary evidence is placed before them and there is no assumption regarding whether the people who wrote those documents were trying to inform the recipients, or whether these writers’ intentions might have been, in some instances, instead to mislead or even to deceive those recipients. A juror might take interpretive shortcuts, such as always believing that everyone communicated honestly, and this might make that juror’s interpretive job easier, but not if inconsistencies exist within the evidence – as often does happen. Whenever such inconsistencies are found, this juror may discover that an assumption of a person’s honesty will actually complicate his understanding, so much as to make any rational verdict impossible. Thus, in many cases, a juror’s job can end up being a slow and careful evaluation of a given body of evidence, to reconstruct a history from that evidence, so as to meet the given standard of proof (such as a preponderance of the evidence, or beyond a reasonable doubt), while at the same time explaining whatever contradictions exist among the evidence, instead of ignoring those contradictions. This is how an authentic history can be produced, from evidence, even when there are evidentiary contradictions. This is how a juror can come to know history, slowly and carefully from the evidence, with a degree of rational confidence that vastly exceeds any other method. We use this method – modern legal/forensic methodology – in cases that are consequential enough to make worthwhile the coming to know their history slowly and carefully, because their stakes are high. The kinds of cases that are considered in courts tend to be high-stakes cases. So, too, is the case here: reconstructing, from the evidence, the event that created Christianity.

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In or around the year 54, Paul wrote a letter to be read aloud to the congregations of Jesus-followers he had started in Galatia. He was afraid of losing some of his men to Jesus-followers who disagreed with Paul, and he wrote with such urgency and passion that one might even think he was fighting here for the success of his life’s work – because he actually was. These high stakes were the reason Paul put into his letter everything he had, hoping to persuade those followers to stay with him, in his congregations.

Of course, this letter to the Galatians wasn’t like, say, Sophocles’s Elektra, or Aeschylus’s Oresteian trilogy: it was no fictional tragedy, with dramatic effects in sex, family relationships, and murder, and with royal principal characters, whose lives and deaths held intrinsic interest to large masses of people. This letter, in fact, described events that took place among real people, who were obscure in their own time.

But Paul’s letter to the Galatians is a tragedy, nonetheless. It doesn’t merely describe, it also participates in, a nonfictional tragedy, in which virtually all of us today perform roles, though unknowingly (until now).

The role of the legal/forensic investigator is simply to expose this real-life drama accurately – even to others of its unknowing participants, two millennia afterwards, whose world has been shaped both by the events that this letter describes, and by Paul’s stunning success at winning over its recipients to his side in the conflict it joined.

So: let’s start as did this letter’s author, Paul, at the very beginning, when he took up a pen, which was made of either quill or reed, and dipped it into ink; this is how he applied ink to papyrus (parchment being too expensive, and thus not commonly employed for letters). All of those parts – the pen, the ink, and the papyrus – are long since gone, and only what Paul wrote has come down to us. Paul said, in Galatians 6:11, “Notice how large my letters are as I write this in my own hand.” But it’s all mere dust now; only what he wrote survives, to provide the crucial evidence. Two-thousand years later, in our own emerging Age of Science, we might hope that this ancient piece of evidence will bring forth the ultimate undoing of the tragic story, the story this letter both begins and reluctantly describes.

In the present analysis, italics will be employed not to provide emphasis, but to provide clarity to the reading of the text. Words are italicized so that the reader will understand the given passage at once, not need to re-read it.

This clarity will be especially helpful in the present chapter, because this chapter requires by far the greatest concentration of all chapters in the book. Afterwards, everything is pretty much a breeze to understand. The reason this chapter is difficult is that it provides the basis for understanding the passage that constitutes the climax of Galatians, 2:11-21, Paul’s description of the actual creation of Christianity. On this basis, the second chapter will provide the full details, from Paul, about Christianity’s creation – the event that Paul describes there. The present chapter is Paul’s description of the circumstances that led up to his creation of Christianity, and is thus the foundation for understanding everything.

Any reader who finds this chapter too taxing, might at any time skip forward to our second chapter, which describes the event that started Christianity, and then page back to this chapter wherever Chapter 2 refers to the lines discussed here: 1:1-2:10. However, the analysis in the present chapter provides the best case-study of how to become empowered to read documentary evidence so as to reconstruct from it the actual circumstances that caused it to be written as it is. Purely for the methodology of understanding written forms of persuasion (such as Galatians), this chapter is the prime one.

Perhaps you’ll want to get your Bible out now, and turn to Galatians. (You’ll also find the crucial part of Galatians, from the start up through 2:21, reproduced herein complete as the Part One Appendix, starting on page 75, just in case you don’t happen to have a Bible. You might want to read it through there once or twice before proceeding, so as to get your initial bearings on it.¹⁰) That’s the document; it will place Paul now onto the witness stand before us, facing a cross-examination, and legal/forensic analysis (below), which Paul never knew when he was alive, nor since (till this very moment).

As was the custom with letters (or “epistles”), Galatians opens abruptly, with 1:1, a succinct identification of the letter’s writer. He is:

1:1 [From] Paul, whose call to be an apostle came not via man or by means of man, but via Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead.

Right off the bat, Paul simultaneously prepares the way here for FOUR of his important strategic objectives, each of which he will develop throughout the letter:

First, he’s saying that his own status as an “apostle” comes via the authority of not MERE MORTAL MEN, but of both God and Christ. Note especially that, right away, Paul has here, implicitly, CORRECTLY identified his target market (his readership whom he aims to convince) as consisting of RELIGIOUS people: people for whom the most persuasive forms of alleged evidence are not natural (“from man or by means of man”), but rather supernatural (supposed miracles, in this case by God and Christ). He starts off by asserting his own claimed authority to speak for Jesus ON THIS SPECIFIC BASIS; that is to say, on the basis of his target-audience’s underlying religious, rather than scientific, EPISTEMOLOGY (or criteria for determining truth/falsity). (As a juror, you’ll examine this line in Galatians for yourself, and commit yea or nay on your concurrence with this observation about it, before proceeding any further. Throughout, the comments made here are only statements about the evidence, and aren’t themselves evidence. These comments are intended only to assist you in your reading/understanding of the evidence, nothing more. Paul’s text is itself the evidence being examined, and – for you – only you can interpret it. Someone else’s interpretation, such as that of either the prosecuting attorney or the defense attorney, can, at best, only assist you, by calling your attention to, or else explaining, particular aspects of the evidence. To the extent that any attorney does more, it’s improper: either distracting or outright deceptive. A judge is supposed to prohibit that.) The underlying assumption he is putting forth here – what he is implying without explicitly asserting – is that supernatural authorization is better, of better quality, more authoritative, than natural authorization (“by man, or by means of man”). Paul is here implicitly claiming supernatural authority from his now-popularly-referred-to “Damascus road experience” of the Risen Christ that he mentions later in 1:16, and that Paul also mentions in 1 Corinthians 9:1, 11:23-25 & 15:3-11; and 2 Corinthians 12:1-7; and that’s further described in Acts 9:3-9, 22:6-21 & 26:12-18.¹¹ This claim of supernatural authorization immediately distinguishes Paul’s authority as being (from the standpoint of his religious target market) allegedly superior to that of the people whom he’ll soon be implicitly identifying as his opponents, whose apostleship is assumedly MERELY “from man or by means of man.” Paul’s position here is, indeed, an extraordinarily authoritative one to present to such a religious audience, for whom Jesus’s disciples, who knew the man “in the flesh” rather than purely “from [the resurrected] Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised Him from death,” would thus stand in a far less authoritative position. Paul understood the importance of identifying and appealing to his target market, even though the field of technical marketing research didn’t exist until thousands of years later. He exhibits here a sophisticated intuitive understanding of the marketing challenge he faced, and of how to overcome it. As a person who admittedly had never met the living Jesus, Paul needed somehow to overcome the authority, about Jesus, that could be wielded by his opponents who did know Jesus “from man or by means of man.” Paul, after all, was only a relative latecomer to joining the group – he had joined it only after Jesus’s death, whereas the disciples were members and had supported Jesus while Jesus was alive. Paul immediately faces this immense challenge head-on: right at the letter’s start, he implicitly acknowledges lacking his opponents’ kind of authority; while, IN THE SAME BREATH, he also implicitly places his authority ABOVE that, as purely supernatural and even divine in character, supposedly uncorrupted by matters of the flesh. This is a very important tactic for Paul’s persuasive purposes. At the letter’s start, where, by custom, the writer was to identify himself, he identifies himself as having received his authority directly from God and Christ, and not at all from any man. As we’ll soon see, this assertion of purely divine authorization will be repeated/reinforced numerous times in Galatians. Modern marketing, both research and practice, likewise recognizes the crucial effectiveness of repetition. So, the first thing that Paul is doing in this opening line is to distinguish himself from his competitors, by means of carefully chosen words that implicitly place him at a competitive advantage in the eyes of his target market. Scholars don’t mention such things as Paul’s “target market,” or “competitive advantage,” but no legal/forensic analysis can proceed by thus ignoring a letter-writer’s intended audience or target market, and what he’s selling or trying to achieve, and how he’s doing it. The standards of a court of law within a democracy are set by science, and not by less-demanding mere scholarship. So, the target market, and the means of competitive advantage, are discussed here, because this investigation has to be scientific¹² for legal-forensic standards.

Second, in this same line, Paul separates Jesus from all men, and thus, especially, from Jesus’s true apostles (the people who were Jesus’s followers during his lifetime, who will soon appear here as Paul’s opponents). Paul presents Jesus as being different from other humans: part of God. Paul does this by explicitly introducing the DUALITY of God, in the Father and the Son. This is a remarkable concept that he restates in 1:3; and more explicitly in 1:16, 2:20, and 4:4. He’ll add yet the THIRD Trinitarian element, of Spirit (the Holy Ghost), in 3:14, 4:6, 5:16-18, 5:22, 5:25, and 6:8. But, even in this letter’s FIRST line, Paul is already going BEYOND the Jewish unitary monotheistic God, to a dualistic God, in which Paul’s “Christ” transcends being merely a prophet who RECEIVES the Law (like Moses; or, conceivably here, like Jesus’s own authentic APOSTLES, Paul’s opponents, could become); and Jesus, as Paul’s “Christ,” is here JOINED TO GOD HIMSELF as, essentially, the co-lawgiver or otherwise the direct CO-GRANTOR of covenant (or of God’s agreement with, and promise to, God’s people). Paul thus is enabled to cast himself as being this new covenant’s DIRECT RECIPIENT (through his supposed Damascus-road “revelation” of “Christ”), bypassing his opponents’ authority from the living Jesus “from man or by means of man.” Why, then, does Paul grant his “Christ” godly co-authority, along with the Jewish God the Father? Nothing LESS than such a Pauline claim for this “Christ” can provide Paul’s “Christ” the degree of authority that’s required in order for Him to be able to authorize Paul to speak (or here, write) for Him and for God (such as Paul will do in the climactic line, 2:16). Paul’s sole alleged authorization came from this Christ after Jesus’s death (Paul’s claimed personal conversion-event), and so cannot possess any higher status than does that Christ, the supposed after-death Jesus. Paul needed to boost this “Christ” as high as possible, and that meant for this Risen Christ to adjoin God. That split of the Jewish God into at least two parts will thus construct the essential platform from which Paul will be enabled, ultimately in Galatians 2:16, to overthrow the Jewish covenant, the Law of God. No MERE prophet possesses such high authority; nor did Jesus’s apostles, Paul’s foes, possess the authority to replace, or even to change, the covenant, nor did they claim such authority; Paul was here actually manufacturing that authority for Jesus, as the worshipped “Christ,”¹³ precisely so as to enable Paul to sell his own (and, as we’ll see, equally manufactured) “gospel of Christ,” by representing himself as this Christ’s supposedly chosen (by no less than God and Christ) “apostle.” In Islam, EVEN Mohammed is never claimed to have possessed an authority to SUPERSEDE God’s laws/commandments given in the covenant. Paul is here implying that Christ Himself DID; and, subsequently, Paul will even make that claim for Christ explicit. Paul will (in Galatians 2:16 and 3:10-14, as well as in Romans 3:24&26) present a God who replaces His previous covenant with a new one in which the sole requirement is to have faith in His Son. Yet this Son is, miraculously, also an actual part in Himself, and so this God will, supposedly, be demanding faith in Himself, but ONLY THROUGH one’s having faith in His Son. Therefore, Jews, who worship MERELY the Father (and, in Judaism, even the mashiach wasn’t supposed to be WORSHIPPED, since that would violate the First of the Ten Commandments), but who don’t worship ALSO the Son (i.e., Paul’s NON-Jewish version of “the Messiah” in the personage of Christ), are consequently NOT accepted by this Diune, even if not as yet Triune, now distinctively Christian God. This will place unconverted, or non-Christian, Jews, outside of salvation according to Paul’s new Christian faith. Paul hasn’t yet stated this here; he has, however, here laid two important FOUNDATIONS for it: first, that he, Paul, possesses the highest authority to speak (or, here, write) for Christ; and, second, that Christ’s authority is sufficient to consign NON-Christian Jews to damnation. Furthermore, it’s also important to note that, by means of Paul’s construction of this “Christ” as a component in a multi-parted, Diune or even Triune, God, Paul has also separated Jesus from his disciples, Paul’s own opponents, and simultaneously has, yet again, claimed FOR HIMSELF an especially privileged, purely supernatural, authority, by which he, Paul, can represent (or speak and write for) this now-godly version of the historical Jesus. All of this, and we’re still only partway through 1:1! That’s how packed with “subliminal sell” Paul’s writings actually were.

Third, and connected to the point just discussed, Paul here is implicitly challenging the Jewish covenant, the very same covenant that he’ll be explicitly overthrowing in 2:16 when he says that “a person wins God’s approval only by means of Christ-faith, never by obeying God’s commandments.” He does this here by implicitly violating the four parts of the first three of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:3-7; Deut. 5:7-11), which he does by placing “Jesus Christ and God the Father” (his Diune pair) in one and the same category as joint suppliers of his own authority or commission to be an “apostle.” The covenant-violations in this line are direct against the First and Third Commandments, and are indirect, merely door-openers to such direct violations, in respect to both of the two parts of the Second Commandment (“Do not make idols,” and “Do not pray in front of idols”). That is to say: In this line, Paul directly violates the First Commandment against having other gods (such as “the Son” or Paul’s deified “Jesus Christs”),¹⁴ indirectly violates the Second Commandment’s first provision, against making images of God (such as of the crucified Christ), and the Second Commandment’s second provision, against bowing in prayer before such idols; and then he yet again directly violates the Third Commandment against misnaming the one unitary God (via Paul’s renaming it into those two, Diune, parts, of Father and Son, as being his own co-authorizers, which the monotheistic Jewish faith could never accept). This is, therefore, in total, an extremely severe break with Judaism or “the Law”; which is to say, violation against the covenant that constitutes Judaism. Essentially, Judaism’s monotheism is here being challenged twice outright, and twice yet again by means of door-openers to the making of idols, and then to the use of idols in worship as intermediaries or symbols of God – both of which Judaism roundly condemns, and which Christianity readily and quickly instituted as Christian practice, such that Christians everywhere today take for granted as routine both kinds of violations of the Second Commandment. (In keeping with the Second and Third Commandments, Jews were prohibited even from pronouncing God’s name; so, it was spelled “YHWH,” to be as unpronounceable as possible.) Consequently, even in this his introductory line, Paul is implicitly and very strongly casting down the gauntlet to “the Law” (including the Ten Commandments) which he will more explicitly attack in the climax that will be forthcoming, in 2:16.

Fourth, there’s yet MORE in this meaning-compressed line: Paul’s crucial emphasis upon Jesus’s DEATH, as opposed to his life, appears at the line’s end (“the Father, who raised Him from the dead”). This emphasis also REINFORCES in a very subtle way the FIRST-mentioned point: namely, that Paul in this letter will be presuming to his readers that his OWN knowledge of only the Resurrected Christ (UNCONTAMINATED by knowledge of the living Jesus “from man or by means of man”) is superior to, or takes PRECEDENCE over, his opponents’ knowledge that includes and is supposedly contaminated by their having known the living Jesus. However, whereas that first distinction categorizes supernaturally acquired knowledge as being superior to naturally acquired knowledge, this distinction focuses instead on Jesus’s death as being more important for winning a person’s salvation than was His life. Paul is implicitly anticipating, here in his opening line, a key feature of his Christianity (subsequently to be explicitly stated by him in the climax, 2:16-2:21), which is the centrality of Christ’s death to the believer’s personal salvation in heaven; Jesus’s life is not. Paul is, thus, and in yet another way, implying that his purely after-death contact with Christ places Paul in a privileged position to represent this purely godly, and supremely salvific, Christ. Paul’s theological emphasis upon the higher salvific importance of Christ’s Crucifixion/Resurrection than upon that of His life and words, might help to explain why Paul’s letters said only little about the latter, even though there existed plenty of stories then-circulating about Jesus’s life that Paul could have picked up on and parroted as an “apostle” if he had wanted to do so. Yet another reason, however, why Paul didn’t, is simply that Paul knew, quite well, that, if he were to do so, then he would be competing against his opponents, the disciples, on terrain where it was they, and not he, who would possess the overwhelming advantage. He certainly didn’t want¹⁵ to precipitate a situation in which they would compete against him by pouring forth with voluminous first-person recollections of the historical Jesus, and of what he had said, since Paul simply couldn’t compete against such living-Jesus authority. Moreover, it’s striking that when Paul finally will reach the point to which he’s building (2:16-21), he’ll be referring solely to Jesus’s death, and not at all to His life. Paul could have taught not only any PR/advertising executive, but any general in any war. One basic rule of war is to choose, if at all possible, the battleground where you have the greatest advantage, or at least the smallest disadvantage, as against your opponent. Paul did precisely that here. Not only is his Christ purer than what his opponents know and had known, but this is the only Christ that can save the reader a place in heaven.

So, Paul has said all of this – mainly by means of implication instead of by explicit assertion – in merely the first line of Galatians. Paul’s sales-letter has, in four distinct ways, opened by positioning himself, and what he has to sell (which he’ll soon call his “gospel”), at a competitive advantage, as against his opponents. (The term “gospel,” incidentally, meant “good news”; and most successful salesmen claim to be promoting some type of “good news.”) What’s especially interesting here is that in not just one but four different ways, Paul has, in this line, prepped his readers for the climax yet to come in 2:16-21, wherein he describes (after carefully veiled language in 2:1-2:15) the exact occasion on which Christianity (which he in 1:6-9 calls his “gospel”) was actually first asserted, and wherein he essentially defines Christianity without using the term “Christianity.”

(If the reader happens to have encountered other exegeses of Galatians, then note might be made here that the present analysis differs from others in its methodology,¹⁶ and not in its translation. Although translation issues will occasionally be raised, in applying legal/forensic methodology to Galatians, the difference between this exegesis and others lies not in the translation, but in that methodology itself, as our footnotes explain. In fact, though the interpretation you have just read of 1:1 is worlds away from any previous one, no translation-issues whatsoever separate it from those others; only methodology does.)

1:2 And [this letter comes also from] all brethren who are with me, [and it is addressed] to the churches [“ekklesiais”] in Galatia:

1:2 tells his readers that they have presumably numerous “brothers” in Paul’s operation, and, thus, that his Galatian readers possess a substantial community there, amongst which the letter-writer himself is likewise a “brother” to these readers, and so is, in an important sense, a member of their very own personal family. If Paul’s readers are ultimately going to be leaving the organization, the Jesus-following sect of Jews, that they originally joined, and to commit themselves instead to Paul’s new, non-Jewish, religion (which he had conceived of about four years prior to this letter, at the incident that he’ll be retelling here in 2:11-21), then they had better be sold on something that will be even MORE attractive to them than the Jewish sect Paul had originally sold to them. Paul here implicitly promises them precisely this. But there’s also another important point made in this line, and this second issue is even more significant: Paul here greets these people not just as “brothers,” but as “the EKKLESIAIS in Galatia”; and “EKKLESIA” was a very CAREFULLY selected term, which (as has previously been noted here with regard to Matthew 16:18) referred to ANY kind of assembly, Jewish or otherwise, though Christians today translate it as “church,” as if it referred to a specifically Christian and specifically religious assembly, which isn’t at all what the term referred to. (And Christianity, the doctrine that Paul will assert in 2:16-21, didn’t even exist until the event that he’ll be describing there; so equating “ekklesia” with Christianity is ahistorical, thoroughly false.) As we shall subsequently discuss in more detail, Paul’s Galatian readers believed themselves to be members of the Jesus-sect of Jews, rather than of any NON-Jewish religion; these men (women didn’t count in the value-system of that society: they couldn’t own property; they were property – of men) had originally been converted by Paul to this Jewish sect. Christianity hadn’t been invented until the event Paul will be describing in 2:11-21, an event that (as was mentioned) occurred only about four years prior to this letter; and all followers of Jesus, up till that time, were simply Jews. Not all of Jesus’s followers had been born as Jews, but they all were Jews, because only Jews believed in the mashiach.¹⁷ And yet these men, Paul’s audience, weren’t OFFENDED here to be referred to collectively by Paul’s term (“ekklesiais”) which represented, to them, ANY kind of assemblies, not just synagogues, but even NON-religious assemblies, such as political assemblies. In other words, these men simply weren’t aware, when Paul addressed them as an ekklesia, that he was intending to remove their synagogue or Jewish designation and change them to an entirely new religion, which he had started only about four years earlier. The care in Paul’s word-selection here is exhibited especially by Paul’s having NOT referred to these people as constituting sunagoge (which they actually WERE) in Galatia, which would have, gratuitously AGAINST Paul’s core strategic objectives, REMINDED his readers of their own chosen pre-existing JEWISH identities – identities to which he, Paul, had converted them. A sunagoge referred SPECIFICALLY to a Jewish religious assembly. It was a Jewish ekklesia. Paul’s followers knew themselves as being members of a sunagoge started by Jesus (into which Paul had inducted them), but Paul doesn’t employ that term here; and the reason he doesn’t want to remind them that they’re Jews is that Paul is now aiming to remove them from Judaism; he had only recently created Christianity, the doctrine to be explicitly stated in Galatians 2:16-21. This letter concerns Paul’s transitioning these men from Jesus’s Jewish sect to Paul’s entirely new “church,” the religion that believes in the profoundly non-Judaic – even anti-Judaic – 2:16-21. Paul has to do this inconspicuously so that they don’t know it’s even happening. (If they had noticed that it were happening, then Paul’s effort would have failed; his opponents would have won. Paul thus needed to be extremely careful.) Similarly (as has been noted), Paul’s follower who subsequently wrote Matthew 16:18, also placed into the mouth of Christ Himself the founding of an “EKKLESIA,” so as to avoid there explicit ACKNOWLEDGMENT that what the historical Jesus had ACTUALLY founded, which everyone even in Matthew’s relatively late time knew to have been the case, was a Jewish sect. It could have been called, by Matthew’s Christ, a SUNAGOGE, but this would have destroyed forever the FUTURE myth that Jesus had founded a separate, NON-Jewish, religion; and thus, the avoidance of “sunagoge,” here, displayed the intentions of Paul and of his follower who wrote Matthew to fool FUTURE generations, rather than just their own. It COULDN’T have been called by Matthew’s Christ a THRESKEIA, meaning actually a religion, because then everyone, in Matthew’s own generation, would have recognized that 16:18 was a FRAUDULENT “Jesus”-statement. Everyone, even in that relatively late era, knew that Jesus hadn’t founded any THRESKEIA. (In fact, if Jesus had ever broken from Judaism, he would thereby automatically have renounced any claim to be the mashiach, since only a Jew could even qualify to be the mashiach: according to the legend, God would never anoint a person who wasn’t one of God’s people to be the leader of God’s people.) The avoidance of “threskeia” here thus exhibited their intentions to fool the people of their own time. Matthew’s word-choice of “ekklesia” was safe, for him, because Paul had EARLIER used the same word, in a similar context, successfully, such as here. Thus, Paul truly invented the fraud that Jesus had founded Christianity as a separate, non-Jewish, religion;¹⁸ his followers merely EXPANDED upon it. (Paul will implicitly tell us, in Galatians 2:11-16, when and where he did it; and, in 2:1-10, why. Then, in 2:16-21, he’ll state the new religion – what it believes, which hasn’t changed in 2,000 years.)

1:3 May you all be granted grace and peace by God our Father, and by the Lord Jesus Christ.

1:3, as previously mentioned, reinforces God’s Duality (Father and Son). Again, Paul makes the Jewish God, God the Father, co-equal with Jesus in authorizing Paul. In addition, Paul here pretends to be in a position to communicate to his readers the blessings from both. This, yet again, implies that Paul is the agent for his Diune God. Yet again, Paul is implying that his alleged encounter with Jesus’s ghost conveyed, to Paul, a joint authorization from both God and Jesus.

1:4 Who sacrificed himself to free us from our sins during the present evil age, in accord with the plan of God the Father.

1:4, very subtly, anticipates or prepares the way for the coming climax in 2:16-21, Paul’s assertion of what will REPLACE the Jewish covenant: it previews what Paul will subsequently refer to as his “gospel of Christ,” or “gospel of the Messiah,” which is (2:16-21) faith in the Messiah’s or Christ’s, crucifixion and Resurrection, as being the sole basis for personal salvation, “to free us from our sins,” or to free believers from being punished by God for their sins. “Christ” is the English version of the Greek term, “Christos,” for the Jewish mashiach, or Messiah, and Paul wrote in Greek; thus, from “Christos,” we now have “Christ” and “Christianity.” However, 1:4 doesn’t employ the phrase “gospel of the Messiah” (or “gospel of Christ”); that phrase makes its entrance at the end of 1:7. What we’re getting in 1:4 is just a quickie-version of that gospel’s definition – Paul’s initial statement of what he’s selling (which will be more FULLY presented in 2:16-21). Notice especially that this preliminary version of the definition emphasizes that “Christ gave Himself,” or was crucified, precisely “for our sins,” which, in short form, is the preparatory part, within the coming lines 2:16-21, for Paul’s conclusion in 2:21: “But if a person is put right with God through obedience to the Law, then Christ died for nothing!” By Paul’s pre-encapsulating here his rationale, he’s preparing the reader’s mind to ultimately assent to the more-fully-developed case that he’ll be presenting in 2:16-21. What Paul has to sell – his “gospel of Christ” – will be fully described in that climax.

Paul closes 1:4 by saying that the reason “Christ gave himself” was “obedience to the will of our God the Father,” thus implying that the Father is the top God, above even Christ the Son; and Paul thereby communicates to his followers that Paul is no different from Jews: he places God at the very top. Paul carefully avoids mentioning a crucial fact – that Jews hold only one God, and that the Jews’ god is not just unitary but has no family at all.¹⁹

1:5 To God alone belongs all glory, forever and ever! Amen.

1:5, equally subtly, reassures Paul’s readers (who had thought that he had converted them to a Jewish sect) that the monotheistic unitary God, which they had originally been converted to worshipping, APPROVES of Paul’s message – a message that is supposedly for this very same God’s glory, in accord with Judaism’s First Commandment (Exodus 20:3 and Deuteronomy 5:7). This, therefore, equally subtly, also reinforces in yet another way the point that was differently made in more than one way in 1:1, to the effect that Paul speaks for God. Paul, quite evidently, feels confident that his Gentile readers, whom he himself had brought into this Jewish sect, are thereby sufficiently unknowledgeable about Judaism, so that they won’t even have noticed his Diune God in 1:1 and 1:3, as being in violation of Judaism, and thus in violation of the God he’s honoring here in 1:5. The present line’s end praises pointedly only God the Father, which is the Jewish God, unitary and not comprising within itself also the Son. Consequently, Paul’s real message in this line is that the God of Judaism has no objection to, and is even glorified by, Paul’s teachings. Paul is thereby using to his advantage his earlier teachings to these people, that the Jewish God is the sole judge and basis for a person’s salvation. To employ the vernacular here (and with poetic license): Paul is now taking the Jewish God’s knife, and stabbing it into the Jewish God’s chest. (He’s doing this in front of an audience of new Jews who wouldn’t recognize the Jewish God even if it were to walk right up to them with that knife and command them: “Become circumcised!” So, Paul is safe to treat his people with such contempt: He had largely engineered the superficiality of their involvement with Judaism, and he now merely aims to harvest the fruits of their ignorance and gullibility – which he will harvest plenteously.)²⁰ Likewise, subsequently in the letter (e.g., 2:16), Paul will refer to salvation being based upon how God views a person, rather than upon how Christ, or the Son, does; the role that the Son will play in salvation is instead the Son’s serving as the object of the believer’s faith: the Father judges men, as in Judaism; but what He judges is whether or not a person has faith in the Son; that’s to say, Christ-faith. This will also distinguish the Christian version of salvation as against salvation via adherence to Judaism’s First Commandment, which demands the believer’s faith in the Father, not in any Son. Judaism entails God-faith, instead of Christ-faith. In fact, the Messiah, in Judaism, was never an object to be worshipped. (Similarly, as was previously noted, Mohammed is not an object to be worshipped in Islam: Mohammed was presented as merely God’s prophet, not as a part of God.) To worship the mashiach would have violated the first Three of the Ten Commandments. Jesus’s disciples would never have done such a thing, nor would any purported mashiach have condoned doing it.²¹ By contrast, Christianity demands Christ-faith: Christ is the focus of faith – Paul asserts (in 2:16, as well as in Romans 3:24&26, and elsewhere) that this is what God requires in order to grant a person salvation in heaven. So, Paul in 1:5 is subtly transitioning his followers away from Judaism (personal salvation via obedience to God’s laws or “commandments”) into which he had originally converted them, to their adopting instead Christianity (personal salvation via faith that Jesus is Christ), which he’s now selling (as 2:16 will make clear). He’s here saying that the Jewish God, whom he had originally converted them to worship, will approve of their leaving Judaism to join Paul’s Christianity. Paul is explicitly saying that “God’s glory will be forever, amen,” and is implicitly saying that Paul represents and supports this God – the Jewish God. It’s a way of suggesting to his Gentile converts, to a Jewish sect, that he’s not aiming to convert them to something else – which, however, is exactly what Paul is trying to do.

In fact, though a faith that Jesus was the mashiach wasn’t necessarily inconsistent with Judaism, any worship of Jesus, as Christ or anything else, is repugnant not merely to individual Jews, but to Judaism itself. Jews, as signatories to their covenant with God, are committed to obey the covenant, and thus aren’t permitted to worship any person: not even Abraham, nor Moses, nor King David – the latter of whom is viewed as being the very model for, and the defining ancestor of, the prophesied mashiach. Worshipping the mashiach would have seemed just as repulsive to Jesus’s followers as would worshipping King David. It was and is prohibited. In Judaism, only the unitary creator-God was worshipped during Jesus’s time, exactly as in ours, because that’s what the first three of Judaism’s Ten Commandments demand. Paul here pretends to be respecting that.

As was mentioned previously, the Jewish God has no family – no “Son,” no wife, no brother, no relative of any kind. The Jewish legend asserted instead that He has only a People, Jews, who are comprised of each signatory of His covenant to obey His commandments, so long as the given signatory does obey those commandments and thereby fulfill the contract, the Torah laws. Pagan gods (such as Zeus or Jupiter) had family, and so Paul could pull the pagan wool over the eyes of his Gentile “converts,” but that’s all it actually was. Upon the basis of their previous pagan gods, Paul could fool these men. He knew his market, and he took advantage of that knowledge in order to get them to do what he wanted, which was to remain his followers, even if this would now have to mean their no longer being followers of James, which meant their no longer being followers of Jesus.

1:6 I am shocked that you are so quickly abandoning the one who called you by the grace of Christ and that you are turning instead to another gospel.

1:7 But of course, there isn’t really any other gospel, and it’s only a perversion of the gospel of Christ, and has been offered by some others, so as to mislead you.

1:8 However, even if we or an angel from heaven were to proclaim a gospel contrary to the one which we have taught you, then such a person should be condemned to hell!

1:9 I shall repeat what I’ve said before: If anyone preaches to you a different gospel, he should go to hell!

1:6-9 introduces Paul’s as-yet-barely-defined “gospel of Christ” (1:7) as being somehow opposed by as-yet entirely anonymous others, who should (Paul twice says, first in 1:8, and then REPEATED for emphasis in 1:9) “be condemned to hell!” Paul’s war is now drawing closer; the sound of his rhetorical artillery is here growing distinctly audible. But yet his enemy still remains invisible in the distance, and will remain, in this letter, unheard-from in any EXPLICIT way. (Paul never quotes or otherwise presents his opponents’ COUNTER-arguments to his own). (Fortunately, their counter-arguments are implicitly clearly reconstructible, and will here, for the first time, be reconstructed.) Paul’s terminological usage of the phrase “gospel of the Messiah,” referring to what he’s preaching, intentionally avoids making explicitly clear to his Galatian readers that Paul is aiming to wean them AWAY from Judaism; this is why the phrase, “gospel of Christ,” or “gospel of the Messiah,” was acceptable to his readers: that phrase sounded, to people of its era, very much like the belief-system of a JEWISH sect, especially because the “Messiah” was, itself, a thoroughly Jewish concept. Consequently, Paul was able to preach this “gospel” even while not EXPLICITLY informing his readers that he was aiming to convert them AWAY from the religion that he had initially converted them TO. Another very important point, which Paul is introducing in this passage, is 1:7, “There is only one gospel of the Messiah, but there are some people who are trying to change it,” and then, he repeats twice in 1:8 and 1:9, “whoever would preach to you a gospel that is different from the one that we have preached to you, should be condemned to hell!” Paul’s implication here is that his “gospel of the Messiah” has never changed and is the thing he has always preached unchanged to them. We make special note of this, because, in our upcoming discussion of 2:11-16, we’ll demonstrate that an earlier letter from Paul, 1 Thessalonians, testifies in its passage 4:1-8, that Paul’s “gospel of the Messiah” had, in fact, been different then, and CHANGED subsequently (after the council in Jerusalem, which is referred to in Galatians 2:1-10), so that what Paul is now saying in Galatians 1:7-8 is actually false, and he had to know that it was false – a lie. This is one of the reasons why Paul is not here DEFINING what his actually NEW gospel of the Messiah IS. He’s holding that off till later in this letter, in 2:16, which is far enough separated from 1:7-8 so that probably none of Paul’s Galatian readers will even NOTICE that there’s a difference between his new “gospel of Christ” in 2:16, and his previous teaching (as in 1 Thessalonians 4:1-8). All that his Galatian readers know thus far about Paul’s gospel is what he has told them in 1:4, which is sufficiently skeletal a definition, so that it applies to BOTH his previous, and his new, versions of it: 1:4 is so vague a “gospel,” that it describes Paul’s previous Jewish version, AS WELL AS his current and future Christian one. In this sense, the present passage, 1:6-9, serves the function of a subtle, indeed imperceptible, but still crucial, psychological transition, both to prepare his Galatian readers to hate his enemies (who “should be condemned to hell!”), and to transform those readers from membership in his enemies’ Jewish sect, into becoming members of his own entirely new religion. He’s making this transition imperceptible to his readers, because if he were to be direct about it, he’d lose them. By the time he actually states his gospel of Christ, in 2:16-21, his audience probably won’t even remember that here in 1:6-9 he had asserted that this “gospel” hadn’t changed. What Paul is doing in 1:6-9 is to accuse his opponents of changing their “gospel,” which was Judaism. But Paul is actually changing his “gospel” from the Judaism he had originally preached, to Christianity; and he’s doing this in a way that he thinks his gulls won’t even notice. (Scholars don’t notice it, either, but we must, and we’ll document all details of this change when discussing 2:11-21.)²²

1:10 Do you think I’m just trying to please people? It’s only God I’m trying to please. If I were pleasing people, I wouldn’t be serving Christ.

1:11 For I want you to know, my brethren, that the gospel I teach isn’t of human origin.

1:12 For I didn’t receive this gospel from a human source; I received it from a revelation by Jesus Christ.

1:10-12 constitutes the first of the many reinforcements that Paul will bring to bear upon his initial claim, in 1:1, that his own authority is divine. Paul’s argumentative tactic in this is always the IMPLICIT one: that his enemies, even those who were known by his Galatian readers to have been PERSONAL ACQUAINTANCES of the living Jesus, had received their authority MERELY “from man or by means of man” (1:1). 1:12 states that Paul had received his commission “from a revelation by Jesus Christ.” Unlike 1:1, there is no mention here of “God the Father, who raised him from death.” In 1:1, Paul had added the mention of God, under an assumption that Christ wouldn’t have appeared to Paul in his “revelation,” unless God, who had raised Jesus from the dead, had wished it. In 1:10, Paul employs a different means of identifying God as the authority he’s trying to please: He asserts directly, “It’s only God I’m trying to please.” This recapitulates 1:5. Paul is saying that the way he aims to please God is by “serving Christ.” In Judaism, one pleases God by obeying His commandments, but Paul in 2:16 will present an alternative.

1:13 You’ve probably heard how I behaved in my earlier life, as a Jew, how I persecuted mercilessly the church of God, and tried to destroy it.

In 1:13, we learn from Paul “how I used to live when I was devoted to the Jewish religion” (which implicitly means that Paul once WAS a Jew, but also that at the present stage of his claimed followership of Jesus, Paul has renounced Judaism and now no longer considers his Christianity – his “gospel of the Messiah” – to be a sect of Judaism; i.e., HIS BREAK WITH JUDAISM HAS ALREADY OCCURRED, and yet he doesn’t EXPLICITLY INFORM his Galatian readers of this); and also, “how I persecuted without mercy the church [EKKLESIA] of God and did my best to destroy it” (which brings into focus his implicit view that Jews are hostile to Christianity – an important theme that Paul IMPLICITLY REITERATED in numerous contexts, and explicitly stated in 1 Thessalonians 2:15). It might also be noted here that, since Paul has already previously (in 1:2) addressed his readers as being members of an “ekklesia,” his REPETITION of that term in the present context is very subtly informing his readers that, WHEN he himself had BEEN Jewish, he had been persecuting people who were LIKE THEMSELVES. This is yet another tactful way of his informing them – only implicitly, not at all explicitly – that Jews aren’t actually like THEY are, but are, instead, DANGEROUS to people such as they. In germinal form, this is a charge that the Roman Catholic Church and its “Saints” historically developed at length: that Jews are DANGEROUS to Christians. (For example, St. Justin Martyr, at around the year 160, wrote, in his Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, Ch. 133, [in one widely available translation] “For verily your hand is high to commit murder, because ye slew the Christ, and do not repent of it, but so far from that, ye hate and murder us who have believed through Him in the God and Father of all, as often as ye can.”) Paul is here implying that he knows, from his personal experience, that this is true; he’s here implicitly using his own former Jewish faith very skillfully as a RHETORICAL WEAPON against Judaism ITSELF.

This line conclusively proves, by logically necessary implicit declaration and not by any explicit or overt assertion (which would have drawn negative attention to him from his readers, whom he had previously converted to Judaism, and so he here avoids explicitly stating this), that he’s no longer a Jew. He says here that he used to be a Jew, but implies that he isn’t one any longer. The passage also says that, when he was a Jew, he “persecuted without mercy” people such as his readers are. Paul, in other words, is here setting his readers up to fear Jews. He’s not only saying that he no longer is a Jew, but that his readers would reasonably fear people who are. This is a remarkable achievement from a man who had converted these same readers into this Jewish sect; he couldn’t achieve it if he were to have stated explicitly that Jews are hostile to people who accept Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. His readers know that the disciples in Jerusalem, their own religious leaders, who were followers of Jesus while Jesus was alive and who have continued as Jesus’s followers and supporters, are all Jews. And that’s why Paul states this only implicitly. However, the assertion is no less categorical on account of its being logically implicit rather than explicit: it’s an unequivocal assertion, just as if it were stated in overt terms. But it’s also a belief that he cannot admit to his readers that he holds: he’s out to manipulate, not to inform, them, and this is how he does that.

1:14 I was more advanced than many Jews of my age in the practice of Judaism, and was much more devoted to Jewish traditions, the traditions of my ancestors.

In 1:14, Paul now EXPLAINS this “without mercy”: “I was ahead of most fellow Jews of my age in my practice of the Jewish religion, and was much more devoted to the traditions of our ancestors.” He’s here stating exactly what had caused the mercilessness of his early opposition to the Jesus-followers. He’s implying that, whereas Jews are his readers’ enemies, the most devout Jews are mercilessly so. Clearly, Paul is here implying that Judaism leads, or inspires, its believers to attack Christians. This assertion, even though implicit and not explicit, is the hate-mongering anti-Semitic original,²³ subsequently to be embellished in many Christian myths that Jews are dangerous to Christians. A common Medieval myth thus emerged that Jews killed Christians and drank their blood. Such behavior was widely suspected of Deicidists. Acts 8:1-3 provides a tale of the PRE-Christian Paul, as “Saul,” having approved of the murder of one Christian, and of his having dragged others and thrown them into jail. Paul is now saying that the REASON why he was so especially dangerous to followers of Jesus – followers such as the readers of this letter, of course, are themselves – is that he was even MORE Jewish than were other Jews. Neither Paul nor his followers (such as the author of Acts) ever explicitly mentioned that those Jesus-followers whom Paul then persecuted were themselves Jews who had been born Jews: Paul is now setting forth onto a second and far more damaging round of doing the same thing to the followers of Jesus/James, but this time as the originator of these attacks, instead of as a mere operative for someone else (perhaps he had even been an operative for the same Roman authorities who had crucified Jesus for sedition), if he indeed was someone else’s agent in those earlier incidents. This omission might have been serving for Paul a directly PERSONAL psychological function: to help him deal with feelings of GUILT he might have then been experiencing on account of his having “persecuted without mercy the church of God” and done “my best to destroy it.” Given that he now alleged to feel this way about what he had previously done, it’s very possible that (unless he was now lying) he felt deep pangs of guilt about what he had done. He here allays that shame, by transferring this blame away from himself personally, and onto his previous religion, Judaism. He does this by his attributing that outrageous behavior to his having been exceptionally “devoted to the Jewish religion” and “the traditions of our ancestors.” In his own mind, he could sincerely have held that Judaism was to blame: He could have thought that the chief rabbi of the Temple’s having been appointed by the Roman occupying authority constituted, for him, “the traditions of our ancestors,” and he could sincerely have blamed Judaism for this recent tradition, even though that would have been factually false (since it wasn’t at all among “the traditions of our ancestors”). This implicit condemnation of strict Jews would have been blaming the victims, and would be entirely in keeping with Paul’s basic outlook on life as reflected in his letters, his worship of the very personification of Power, The Almighty. Paul is, in any case, here setting his readers up for his coming onslaught against “the traditions of our ancestors”; i.e., against “the Law,” which is to say against Jewish belief itself, which had supposedly caused him to be “without mercy,” and he’s now favoring instead faith and grace – the salvation-doctrine that he will soon (in 2:16-21) be introducing instead of Judaism. This obviously serves a practical purpose in Paul’s program, irrespective of how he rationalized it to himself at the time. Consequently, in his present view (again assuming that he wasn’t lying here), the more strongly that he now separates himself from “the Jewish religion” and “the traditions of our ancestors,” the better and purer a Christian he will be able to become and be. He is, then, now attacking Judaism not only in order to drive a wedge separating his followers from it, but also in order to absolve himself of those pangs of guilt – blaming Judaism for his own prior cruelty.

Importantly, he’s also signifying to his readers that any followers of Jesus who continue to assert Jewish Law could, themselves, become dangerous to his readers, in the same way that Paul used to be dangerous to the followers of Jesus. (Presumably, he’s referring here to incidents such as Acts 8:1-3 describe, when Paul was called Saul and persecuted Jesus’s followers, before he supposedly joined their group.) This is not only a warning for his readers to avoid taking Jewish Law – that is, Judaism – too seriously, but it’s also a warning for them to avoid the people who do so, possibly including, as he had already instructed the Galatians twice in 1:8 and 1:9, “whoever would preach to you a gospel that is different from the one that we have preached to you, should be condemned to hell!” Paul is thus employing several devices to make his readers fear and hate Jews, who hold “a gospel that is different.”

It might be noted here that Galatians presents Judaism (the covenant) in so clearly negative a light, so that probably no born Jews were in the Galatian congregations; they were probably all Gentiles, uncircumcised people, whom Paul had converted to Judaism; specifically, to the Jewish sect that Jesus had started. No indication is provided in Galatians that Paul felt any need to mollify the circumcised. By contrast, Paul’s later letter written to the Roman congregations seems to have been addressed to congregations that included a significant number of born Jews. For example, Romans 9-11 appeals to members of the Roman congregations by presenting a God who accepts everyone who possesses faith in Jesus as the prophesied mashiach, and this includes born Jews as well as the Gentile converts to Jesus’s Jewish sect. (However, even there, Paul said of non-Jesus-following Jews, in Romans 11:28, “Because they reject the gospel or good news about Christ, which was granted for your benefit, the Jews are God’s enemies, even though God loves them on account of their ancestors.”²⁴) Galatians exhibits no such concern to placate born Jews within these congregations – it presents as being dangerous, to the Gentile converts, the born Jews who are committed to the entire Jewish covenant.

Galatians 1:13-14, in other words, tells the letter’s audience: Judaism, the covenant itself, is dangerous to you; and that’s why I, Paul, was dangerous to you before I abandoned it and joined you.²⁵

1:15 But when God, who had cast his grace upon me before I was born,

In 1:15, he’s claiming that “God chose me even before I was born,” and he’s thus setting up the reader to accept Paul’s authority on a basis so high that only Jesus Himself had previously possessed such lofty authority for the reader. (Paul can do that with these people, because he had introduced them to the Jesus sect.) This statement reinforces 1:1, 1:11, and 1:12; Paul obviously was intent that the reader mustn’t miss this point, of his super-authority. And even now, he’s not done with his repeating of it. At many crucial points in this letter, and also in his other authentic letters, he comes back to this allegation of his super-authority, again and again.

1:16 Saw fit and was so pleased with me as to reveal His Son to me, in order that I might proclaim Him among the Gentiles as the gospel [the good news of personal salvation], I didn’t then seek counsel from any human being,

In 1:16, he’s implicitly recapitulating yet again 1:1, that this letter comes “from Paul, whose call to be an apostle did not come from man by means of man, but from Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised Him from death.” In fact, he both starts and ends this line by reinforcing that even though he had never personally met Jesus, nor heard Him speak “from man by means of man” as 1:1 had put it, such as did Paul’s now-enemies the Jerusalem elders in the Jesus-sect of Jews, who had known and lived with and spoken with, Jesus, over years of intimate contact with Jesus, Paul was nonetheless authorized, on even better grounds – directly from God Himself and from the resurrected Jesus – to speak for and on behalf of Jesus: “I went to no mortal for advice” on this, but only to God and God’s Son, to receive his mission. (Paul wasn’t shy; he was brazen enough to belittle his teachers who had, back then, provided his authority to preach now to these Gentiles. If the disciples in Jerusalem had rejected him back then, Paul would now be nowhere, and he wouldn’t be writing as an authority to these Galatians. But he was nonetheless writing here dismissing those teachers and saying that only God and “His Son” had authorized and taught him.) Paul is here claiming also that his “gospel,” or “good news,” was authorized by none other than both God and Christ – that it came from them. His mission assigned by Them was: “that I might preach of Jesus and proclaim Him [as the Christ] among the Gentiles” – namely, to his readers.

Importantly, this line is the first in which Paul unambiguously refers to Jesus as being God’s unique “Son,” and thus as possessing a distinctive status which Jews and Judaism never asserted nor could possibly assert for the mashiach, who was to be instead merely a king, a prophet, and a revered rabbi. (The Gospel-writers referred to Jesus as specifically a “rabbi” in Matthew 26:25&49; Mark 9:5, 11:21, 14:45; and John 1:38&49, 3:2, 4:31, 6:25, 9:2, 11:8, and 20:16.)²⁶ In this line, 1:16, and also in 4:4 to come, Paul explicitly introduces the Diune God, two thirds of the ultimate Christian God. This Diune God is an anathema to Judaism, a faith based on a monotheistic and entirely unitarian God, and which prohibits as the gravest violation worship of any other God.

Paul here asserts that the Resurrected Jesus was God’s “Son” in a way no one else is, because “I received my authorization from no human being.” Unlike Judaism, where (Psalms 89:26 and Isaiah 64:8) a mortal human can refer to God as “Father,” and so can be a “son of God” even though a mortal human, Paul claims here to have been authorized by an explicitly non-human “Son of God.” Paul’s Diune God – which was, until now, logically implicit – has thus now become explicit. This doesn’t make it any likelier true, but merely displays Paul’s technique of first implying something as an assumption and then, later, (sometimes) asserting it as “true.”

1:17 Nor did I go to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I immediately travelled to Arabia, and then returned to Damascus.

In 1:17, Paul closes in on the coming issue by stating, “nor did I go to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before me,” referring here, for the first time directly, to the apostles, now Paul’s own foes, who had actually met and intimately known and for years conversed with Jesus, rather than having supposedly encountered Him only in a “revelation.” These are the same people that Paul is setting his readers up for Paul to be breaking away from and standing against in 2:11-21, the New Testament climax, which describes the conception of Christianity. Paul certainly doesn’t want to grant his enemies respect. He’s now simply reinforcing by implicit means a central point: that Paul wasn’t speaking on behalf of those who had known and suffered along with Jesus but were still living and able to state from their own personal recollections what Jesus had actually said and done. By Paul’s here re-emphasizing that he hadn’t so much as even just consulted with these people, he implicitly reiterates his disrespect for their authority, and thus, yet again, helps to set the reader up to accept his own superiority over them in the coming, climactic, disagreement (2:11-21).

1:18 Three years after returning, I finally went to Jerusalem, to make the acquaintance of Peter, and to stay with him for fifteen days.

1:18 indicates that three years into his ministry, “I went to Jerusalem to get to know Peter [Cephas], and I stayed with him for two weeks.” In Acts 10:34-11:18, whose real core is the line 11:2 stating what all the rest was actually all about, Peter at around this same time is described as having successfully been preaching to the Gentiles; and (11:2) “those who were in favor of circumcising Gentile male converts criticized him,” but Peter managed at least temporarily to allay those concerns. In Galatians 1:18, Paul is finally coming to Jerusalem to receive acknowledgment and advice from his senior in his mission to the Gentiles, and he stays with Peter for two weeks of, essentially, missionary training from the man who presumably was the founder of the sect’s outreach program to convert non-Jews. Peter himself left no writings; the two letters attributed to him in the New Testament were actually written by followers of Paul, after Peter’s death.

1:19 But I didn’t see any other apostle, except for the Lord’s brother James.

1:19 states, “I did not see any other apostle except James, the Lord’s brother.” Finally, Paul here meets the leader of the Jesus-sect of Judaism – the man who is ultimately to be his nemesis in 2:12, and in Acts 21:21 forward. But at this stage in Galatians, there’s not yet a split between them. This might be the same visit to Jerusalem that’s reported, very differently, in Acts 9:26-30, which says that the disciples were, at first, extremely suspicious of him, presumably because of his prior violent opposition to the Jesus-following movement. However, in Paul’s account, no indication is given of any suspicions by the Jesus-followers that he may actually be an enemy agent whose real motive is to infiltrate and thus to harm the movement. (After all, Rome had crucified this movement’s very founder.) Paul’s account of his initial meeting with Jesus’s disciples omits any such reference, inasmuch as it would have been contrary to his objectives to gratuitously remind the Galatians that such suspicions of his motives existed at all. As with any great rhetorician, Paul’s omissions were just as skillful as his assertions. Unlike the account that’s presented in Acts 9:21-30, in which the suspicions against Paul were supposedly that he might be a secret Jewish agent, any suspicions that might actually have existed against him on the part of Jesus’s people would probably have been that Paul was a secret Roman agent, trying to infiltrate the followers of this man whom Rome had executed for sedition, and thereby to suppress any ongoing sedition-threat that these followers might still be posing to Roman authority.²⁷ However, Paul in his letters leaves out any hints that the Jesus disciples had any suspicions of him at all; and whether the disciples did or didn’t cannot be confidently established. The scholar Robert Eisenman, in a 1996 article on the internet, “Paul as Herodian,” argues that Paul was probably a Roman agent from the very start, a Roman spy/saboteur aiming secretly to do to Jesus’s movement what Rome had already publicly done to Jesus himself, and was thus a Roman intelligence-operative in Rome’s war against the Jews, which ended when Rome destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple in 70 CE. It’s an interesting possibility, entirely consistent with the documentary record (such as Acts 22:5), but not proven by it. What can be proven is that Rome was at war against the Jews, that Paul favored the Romans, that the Romans crucified the Jew Jesus, and that Paul hated both Judaism and Jews (as will be further documented). It’s quite possible that Paul’s hatred of Judaism and Jews began only after, and as a consequence of, the Council in Jerusalem and its immediate aftermath (the incidents recounted in Galatians 2), rather than prior to his entrance into the Jesus-sect; and, if this is true, then Eisenman’s theory here is false.²⁸

Regarding Paul’s reference to “James, the Lord’s brother,” many scholars have questioned whether this phrase meant what it said. Preferring to believe that no Jesus-disciple was physically related to Jesus – much less, perhaps, Jesus’s appointed successor – these traditional Christian-apologetic scholars have hypothesized that Paul meant only that James was a disciple of Jesus, and that all such disciples were “brothers,” in a broader sense. However, those scholars are clearly wrong: no other prominent Jesus-disciple was commonly referred to as “the brother of the Lord,” or as “Jesus’s brother.” Above all, Peter, whom these apologists like to think of as having been the group’s leader, was not the leader (as will be proven here). Furthermore, it wasn’t only Paul who referred to James in this remarkable way. The other earliest writer concerning James, which was Josephus (in his Antiquities of the Jews, 20:9:1), likewise called this James Jesus’s brother, and even several of the subsequent Church-historians did. “James” (“Jacob”) was at that time a common name, and clearly the modifier that this James was “Jesus’s brother” was intended to indicate which James was being referred to by the given writer. Josephus was even clearer than that, by identifying this particular “Jesus” (also a common name) as “the so-called Christ.” Some scholars question whether “the Lord” in Paul’s phrase “James, the brother of the Lord,” referred to Jesus, but Paul’s authentic letters frequently employed the phrase “the Lord” as a synonym to refer to Christ or to Jesus (such as in Galatians 1:3, “God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ”), and no basis exists to assume otherwise. Furthermore, the earliest of the canonical four Gospels, Mark, at 6:3, says that Jesus was “the brother of James, Joses, Judas, and Simon,” and that Jesus also had (unidentified) “sisters.” None of the contortions by scholars provide reason to read “James, the Lord’s brother” as anything other than Jesus’s biological brother. So, Paul undoubtedly referred here to a James who was biologically a brother of Jesus, not merely to a disciple of Jesus. Ancient Greek, like many modern languages, used the term for “brother” in two different senses, one biological, and the other – as in Galatians 1:3 – metaphorical (merely collegial), but the meaning here was clearly the biological one, and there is no reason for thinking otherwise.²⁹

1:20 In writing this to you, I swear to God, I’m not lying!

1:20, “What I say, I swear to God I am not lying!” shows that, when Paul was writing, there had evidently been a contrary account of some sort circulating. The likely prospect here is the evident contradiction with Acts 9:26-30, which has Paul meeting with all of the elders. If Paul here in 1:20 is referring to the same event, he’s asserting that he did not; that he spoke only with Peter and James. However, in any case, Paul couldn’t have been intending here to contradict something said in Acts, since Acts hadn’t yet been written; instead, the Acts account would have been based upon the contrary story then circulating, which Paul was here contradicting.

If Paul, on that occasion, met only Peter and James (and there’s no reason for us to believe otherwise), then why would this have been so? One possible reason would have been that Paul was already, by just his third year, aiming to convert Gentiles to this sect, and that Peter was the senior person in that mission, as Peter was described to be in Acts. Paul wanted to spend some time with Peter in order to obtain from him advice as regards what methods Peter had found to be the most effective for interesting Gentiles in conversion to Judaism and for closing the sale to them. As regards Paul’s reason for meeting with James – and Paul didn’t say that he had stayed with him for two weeks, as he had with Peter, but only that he “saw” James – the likeliest reason would have been that James led the group, and that the group’s leader was “seen” by almost everyone who was rising within the organization. However, Paul doesn’t explain why he “did not see any other apostle except for James, the Lord’s brother.” Perhaps one reason why he didn’t explain this is that Paul preferred to focus attention upon supernatural “explanations” for his actions, such as his saying in 1:15 that “God chose me even before I was born.”³⁰ Again: Paul knew his market, and he honed in on it, with total, even obsessive, discipline. As he said in 1 Corinthians 9:26-27: “I do not run uncertainly, as one unfocused upon the finish line. I’m no boxer who merely flails the air and loses focus upon his opponent. I’m like a boxer who handles his body roughly, disciplining and subduing it, so as to avoid failure.”

1:21 Then I went into the regions of Syria and Cilicia.

1:22 And throughout this time, I remained unseen by the churches of Christ that are located in Judea.

1:23 They only heard people say, “The man who formerly persecuted us is now proclaiming the very faith he had tried to destroy.”

1:24 And so, because of me, they glorified God.

1:21-24 acknowledges suspicions against himself not by Jesus’s disciples, but by their followers, who “did not know me personally; they knew only gossip about me.” Thus, Paul is here telling his Galatian readers, by implication, that if they’ve heard anything bad about himself, it’s merely gossip, nothing based on actual knowledge of him: he hadn’t even met them. This is a pre-emptive defensive device on his part, since Paul cannot possibly have known for certain whether, or what, his Galatian readers might possibly have heard about him from his enemies. Paul couches this passage very carefully, just in case any of his Galatian readers might have heard critical comments against himself coming from any of the disciples in person; Paul was judicious in 1:19 to indicate that likewise the disciples themselves didn’t really know him very well. Paul has thus completed his rhetorical preparation that’s necessary in order for him to be fully defended, in advance, against anything that his Galatian readers might possibly have heard against him coming from either the disciples or their agents. He presents himself as being superior in status to his enemies, and yet of equal status to them as being all “apostles” of Jesus, which he himself actually was not, since he, unlike his enemies, had never known the living Jesus. And he has also warned his readers in advance against their believing anything negative against himself that they might possibly have heard coming from his enemies. Now, he’ll describe his conflict with his enemies; yet, also with full carefulness, totally exclude from his account of it what his opponents’ side in this dispute was, or even that it was a conflict at all. In other words, in what’s next to come, Paul is extremely careful to give away to his readers nothing more than he absolutely must reveal in order for him to be able to win them. Not knowing whether, or what, they might possibly have already heard about this conflict from his enemies, Paul is at great pains not to do any of his enemies’ work for them, but to do only his own work here. No direct historical record survives of his enemies’ statements. Fortunately, however, we’ll be able to reconstruct their argument on the basis of Paul’s refutation of it, and of the Old Testament passages whose meanings were in dispute.

It might be noted that 1:22 indicates that the supposed visit by Paul to Jerusalem that Paul’s follower Luke alleged in Acts 11:30 & 12:25 is fictitious. Paul asserts that his second visit to Jerusalem was the one he will be describing in Galatians 2.

2:1 Then, after fourteen years [away from Jerusalem], I went again to Jerusalem, this time with Barnabas and Titus.

2:1, “Fourteen years later I went back to Jerusalem,”³¹ indicates the passing of so very long an interval of time, that it seems inconceivable that the passing of yet more time would have been required in order for Paul’s ongoing admission and accumulation of uncircumcised males into the sect to produce the crisis that’s reported (correctly or not, we don’t know) in Acts 15. This line is absolutely crucial for any authentically historical account of Christianity’s start. Anyone who writes about the start of Christianity and who fails to take into account this line in Galatians is no historian but only a mythologist.

Paul hasn’t yet told us the reason why he went back to Jerusalem. He tells us this in the next line. But after fourteen years, Peter has been (2:7) reassigned “the task of preaching to the Jews”; Paul has now taken over Peter’s former assignment in a higher capacity than before, if not as being himself now the lead evangelist to the Gentiles, then as being at least higher in that assignment than Paul had formerly been. Evidently, Paul was also more successful in this assignment than Peter had been. Paul was thus rising in the organization. Furthermore, Peter’s reassignment to preach to the Jews has evidently been in force now already for some time, and therefore we can reasonably assume that Peter has at least been starting to feel the pressures from circumcised Jews to require all male converts to the sect to adhere to the covenant-forming commandment, Genesis 17:14, in which God said to Abraham, “No uncircumcised male will be one of my people.” Thus, it was taken for granted that every male Jew was circumcised, and the sentiment on the part of these men to exclude any men who weren’t circumcised – to exclude anyone who violated God’s law Genesis 17:14 – was certainly understandable. The question in the sect, during all of these years, has therefore been: are all of these now possibly thousands of uncircumcised adult Gentile male “converts” actually converts; are they actually members of the Jesus sect of Jews, or not? The covenant-forming commandment, clearly, says no – they’re not. But, obviously, these “converts” themselves believed that, yes, they were Jews. And, according to Acts 11:2, Peter himself had accepted them as being so; Paul was merely continuing along that line. However, now, after fourteen years of this definitional limbo, a critical mass of sheer numbers of these “converts” had evidently accumulated, and so the question could, it seems, simply no longer continue to be postponed. Obviously, on the one side of the issue, just as in Acts 11:2, were adherents to the covenant. These were Jews – defined as being adherents to the covenant – and Jesus was their Jewish mashiach or “Messiah.” What other answer could there be for these people? The language of Genesis 17:14 couldn’t possibly have been clearer. Furthermore, this passage wasn’t only a commandment; it was the covenant-forming commandment, the statement from God as to what it means to be one of God’s people; it means, if you’re a male, that you must be circumcised; none who aren’t can be so much as considered even possibly for inclusion among God’s people.³² Yet, there were now all of these maybe thousands of adult Gentile uncircumcised men who believed, and who had been told, otherwise. What should be done about them? Probably by this time, after 17 years of Paul’s work, they constituted even the majority of the sect’s membership. Yet there obviously were Jews within the sect, and all Jews outside it, who believed in the necessity of enforcing the covenant-forming commandment. Procrastination can continue for only so long. It had continued for at least seventeen years. And so now the confrontation finally came.

2:2 I went because of a revelation, and I presented the gospel that I preach among the Gentiles. I presented this privately, to the reputed leaders. I didn’t want to have been running, and to be running, in vain.

2:2 is hardly to be believed when Paul asserts, in reaffirmation of 1:1&11&12&15&16, that he took only from God his instructions to come to this conference; the conference was, in fact, called by James, the man who is to reach the ultimate decision on this matter of circumcision, first at the end of the conference, in both Acts 15:13-21 and Galatians itself 2:10, and subsequently in 2:12 when James will abruptly change his mind on the matter. Obviously, the ultimate decider was the real leader; and the real leader was the ultimate decider. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves: Paul in this line says only, “I went because God revealed to me that I should go. In a private meeting with the supposed leaders I explained the Gospel message that I preach to the Gentiles. I did not want the race that I have been running to have been run in vain; I did not want my life’s work for the past seventeen years to end up being a waste.” (His literal construction here was the incredibly brief “lest I have run and am running in vain,” the kind of super-cryptic expression to which Paul typically resorted when he was saying something that was both specially important, and especially potentially embarrassing, to him. This phrase here employed a key Pauline metaphor about the importance of success or of “winning the race” in life, a concept that was given its lengthiest exposition in 1 Corinthians 9:24-27, in which he urged his people to “run to win.”³³) Paul is here saying that everything was at stake for him in this conference; his success or failure over the prior seventeen years’ hard work was now to be determined. But he has opened this line by artfully implying to the contrary, that the authentic disciples had not required him to come to this conference, that only God Himself told him to come. This, of course, is intended to hide the fact that this conference, which was to decide his fate, had been called by James precisely in order to decide this question that had been postponed for so long. After all, Paul’s Galatian readers are also at stake for Paul in this. The account of the matter given in Acts even opens (15:1-2), “Some men came from Judaea to Antioch and started to teach the believers, ‘You cannot be saved unless you are circumcised as the Law of Moses requires.’ [Actually, this law preceded Moses, and was Abrahamic; this was the Law of God, not of Moses at all, and this passage reveals that Luke didn’t know the Torah and must therefore have been a Gentile. Any Jew would have recognized that the attribution in this passage in Acts was false; any seriously believing Jew could be routinely expected to know that the circumcision law was Abrahamic not Mosaic. By the time Acts was written, Christianity had evidently already pretty much abandoned the effort to convert Jews, and was concentrating almost exclusively upon converting Gentiles.] [It might also be noted here that there’s debate among scholars as to whether Acts 15 even refers to the same council in Jerusalem as does Galatians 2. All of that debate is just more irrelevant scholarly speculation.³⁴ The interpretation being presented here is based upon Galatians, regardless.] Paul and Barnabas got into a fierce dispute [with the disciples and their followers] about this [necessity of circumcision], and it was therefore decided that Paul and Barnabas and some of the others in Antioch ought to go to Jerusalem to discuss this issue with the elders.” Yet, even this late in his letter, Paul hasn’t so much as even just mentioned circumcision, which is its key issue, soon to transform everything. After all, Paul doesn’t know how much his Galatian readers might have been informed about this particular event. He obviously is hoping that they don’t even know that circumcision is the central issue in it. But he can’t afford to take any chances on this. Now he is, at last, going to tip his hand on this matter, but even when he does so, circumcision will be skillfully kept in the background, only implicitly as being an issue at all, never explicitly as being what it implicitly actually was, the central issue and the reason, not only for the council in Jerusalem he’s here about to describe, but even the reason for his writing this letter at all (as we shall subsequently document in our third chapter, when discussing 5:2-12).

Paul’s admission in 2:2, that his life’s work, up to that moment, was at stake for him at the impending conference in Jerusalem, is absolutely stunning; especially because he doesn’t explain this shocking admission, not in the least. Scholars for two thousand years didn’t press him on it – they didn’t dig here, at all, to find out why his career-success was on the line in this event. They didn’t even note that Paul’s admission of this stood in direct contradiction to Paul’s own immediately accompanying claim that God, and not James, had “revealed to me that I should go” to this conference, instead of what was clearly the fact: James’s having demanded that he come to this crucial conclave to defend the non-circumcision of his congregants, their violation of Genesis 17:14. But why would Paul’s attorneys throughout the ages – that is, why would scholars – have probed into this? They wouldn’t have. They ignored it. If their institutional function was to defend Paul, and to prevent the public from knowing that he was a con-man and that Christianity is a hoax, then, clearly, they’d have gone easy on this admission that he needed to come to this conference, not probed it (as a prosecutor would do) so as to understand why he had to come. Thus, for two thousand years, Paul’s testimony simply wasn’t cross-examined.³⁵ But finally, it will be, here. Paul’s implicit statements will fully and convincingly explain how and why his life’s work for the prior 17 years was at stake for him in this conference (as we shall now see).

2:3 Moreover, even Titus, who was with me, wasn’t required to be circumcised, though he’s a Greek [who isn’t circumcised].

2:4 False brethren had been secretly smuggled in to spy on the freedom [from Judaism’s commandments] that we enjoy in Jesus Christ, and they wanted to enslave us [to those commandments].

2:5 But we stood our ground, so that the truth of the gospel would be protected for you.

2:3-5 reports the scheming of Paul’s opponents to force his Gentile companion, Titus, to be circumcised. Finally, Paul mentions the circumcision-issue, and only at the very start of the council in Jerusalem; he recesses this issue as much as he can; he doesn’t want his readers to know of its centrality to the council meeting in Jerusalem if they haven’t already been informed of that by his enemies. However, in the account of the council’s start that’s presented in Acts 15:5-6, it says, “Some believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees [thereby implicitly acknowledging that despite all of the Gospels’ blanket condemnations of the Pharisees as Jesus’s enemies and even crucifiers, at least some of the Pharisees were actually “believers,” Jesus’s supporters] stood up and said, ‘The Gentiles must be circumcised and told to obey the Law of Moses.’” Acts followed this with a speech from Peter in defense of Paul’s practice against imposing circumcision, and then by James’s decision on the matter. But here in Paul’s account, circumcision isn’t even mentioned as having been a point at issue in the conference; Paul mentions circumcision only as if this conflict about whether or not to circumcise Titus had been an incident that just happened to have preceded the conference itself. And scholars for 2,000 years have gone along with Paul’s tactic here, ignoring its centrality.³⁶

Though circumcision isn’t mentioned as having been at issue in the conference, 2:5 does admit one revealing fact about this incident’s relevance to his readers: that the reason he had stood his ground there against the circumcisers was “to protect the gospel for you.” In other words: he here implicitly admits that the point at issue in this conference was whether or not the circumcision-commandment, Genesis 17:14, is binding upon Paul’s followers.

Paul has laid most of the groundwork now for his war against the continuing applicability of Genesis 17:14. However, an important part of his war is his denigration of the authority of his actual superiors in the organization, because it is those people against whose argument he is actually fighting. And he still has some work to do, in order to diminish their authority.

2:6 The supposed leaders – and what they actually were makes no difference to me, because God doesn’t judge by such outward appearances – made no new suggestions to me.

2:6, “But those who seemed to be the leaders – I say this because it makes no difference what they were,” performs two functions. First, it raises yet again the question in the reader’s mind as to whether or not these people, who will soon be Paul’s opponents, really were the leaders, and so it reinforces, yet again, Paul’s previous implications in 1:1&11&12&15&16 & 2:2, that Paul was himself at least as high in status within the organization as were the authentic Jesus-disciples. Second, it restates by implication that Paul’s own “leaders” were only God and Christ, no “mere” mortals, and so Paul was oblivious as to whether or not anyone in Jerusalem was or wasn’t a “leader”; Paul stood above such concerns. “God does not judge by outward appearances,” likewise serves two rhetorical goals: First, it, yet again, identifies Paul with the “authentic” followers of God, so that the people who knew Jesus “from man or by means of man” (1:1) and who therefore would have had more authority to speak for Him if one were to “judge by outward appearances,” possess a diminished claim to holding such authority. Second, with supreme subtlety, it yet again sets the reader up for the coming assault against judging by actions (here supposedly to be equated with “outward appearances”), versus faith (supposedly, inward reality, as opposed to “outward appearances”). Paul is insinuating here that circumcision (such as of Titus, in 2:3) concerns only “outward appearances”; this is thus yet another implicit dig against Genesis 17:14; Paul is saying, of each Jew’s signature upon that individual Jew’s contract with God – which is his circumcision – that it makes no difference but is merely “for show” (and in 2:16 upcoming, Paul will say why it makes no difference: God has replaced that contract with a different one). “Those alleged leaders, I say, offered no new suggestions to me,” equally subtly, likewise achieves multiple simultaneous objectives for Paul: First, by his employing here the concept “suggestions” instead of “demands” or “commands,” from the “alleged leaders,” this verbal construction is implicitly placing Paul, yet again, as being equal in rank to his actual superiors within the organization.³⁷ Second, what the council issued to Paul, whatever it was, was here supposedly not issued at all, but was rather “offered,” like a request is “offered.” What’s “offered” can be declined; a command, however, must be obeyed. So, by Paul’s using “offered,” he reinforced his insinuation that James, Peter, and the other disciples, were not superior to Paul in the organization. If this encounter is the same one that’s reported in Acts 15, then Paul might here be referring to the Jerusalem leaders ultimately accepting (Acts 15:19) “that we should not trouble the Gentiles who are turning to God,” and that, therefore, only the easier-to-comply-with commandments (dietary, etc.) should be enforced upon the Gentile converts. However, Paul’s account of what was demanded of him, given in 2:10 below, will be even more minimal than that.

2:7 On the contrary, they recognized that God had assigned me to carry the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been entrusted with spreading the gospel to the circumcised.

2:8 For God had given each of us our assignments.

2:7-8, “On the contrary, they saw that God had given me the task of preaching the gospel to the uncircumcised,” reasserts Paul’s authority as having been granted not by mere men, such as was that of James (appointed by Jesus) and the other disciples (likewise appointed by the human Jesus); but instead granted directly by God, the Father and Son. “… just as He had given Peter the task of preaching the gospel to the circumcised,” which the Galatian readers probably assumed anyway, since Peter possessed far higher seniority within the sect than did Paul. Peter’s authority for these readers was unquestioned; Paul’s implication here that he possessed equal status with Peter was, by contrast, a palpable boost in Paul’s status. Furthermore, Paul’s assertion that Peter had received from God and not from James authority to preach to the Gentiles constitutes yet another implicit denigration of James as the sect’s leader. Paul is here implicitly denying that James had assigned Peter the mission to the Gentiles; Paul is skipping over James to attribute Peter’s authority directly to God. (Similarly, Paul here attributes his own authority to God instead of to James. Paul does it in both instances, so as to, yet again, equalize himself to Peter, as both being appointed by God. This writes James out of the picture – a brilliant tactic of deception – and implicitly places only Peter and Paul as being God’s appointees to carry Jesus’s message. Paul here is thus implicitly demoting James from being Paul’s boss – which we shall soon see that James was – to being Paul’s and Peter’s subordinate, and Paul is falsely identifying Peter as being Paul’s ultimate opponent in the dispute that is next coming.) Also worthy to note in this line is Paul’s referring to Jews as “the circumcised,” and to Gentiles as “the uncircumcised.” This implicitly acknowledges the unique role of the circumcision-commandment, Genesis 17:14, because it was the covenant-forming commandment, the basis of Judaism, and so, too, the basis for the distinction that Paul is drawing here, between the two missions, one the mission to Jews, and the other the mission to non-Jews, distinguished solely by the presence or absence of circumcision in those two communities, not distinguished by the presence or absence of circumcision in the respective “gospels” that are taught. Paul will, in fact, just a few lines later (2:15-21), be making clear that there is only one single gospel, which is a point that he already has emphasized earlier (1:7-9). Consequently, Paul is emphatic that there’s only one gospel; the same gospel is being preached to both groups within the Jesus-sect. This also means that the decision at the council in Jerusalem affected the teaching throughout the sect, and not only the teaching by Paul and by other evangelists who were carrying the message to the Gentiles. Even though Paul’s work among Gentiles had precipitated the council, the subject to be decided at the council was to extend universally throughout the sect. In fact, it may very well have been the case that what had finally forced James’s hand to convene this meeting was that, over the course of 17 years, two different “gospels” were indeed beginning to emerge within the sect and so to create a schism within it. There’s no indication that two separate and different “gospel messages” were acceptable to the sect, but only that two different groups of people now constituted the sect, and that, contrary to the sect’s aim, those two groups were becoming separated by two different “gospels.”

“For God had given each of us our assignments” even more emphatically places Paul into a context here in which Paul and Peter are on the same high plane of authority within the sect – something that actually never was so, not only because Paul had been Peter’s student, but also because Peter had personally known Jesus and worked with him whereas Paul had not; and, finally, also because Paul (not only according to Acts but also by his own admission in his letters) was an enemy of Jesus’s Jewish sect before joining it.

2:9 James, Peter, and John, the reputed leaders, recognized my divine assignment, and offered, to me and Barnabas, the right hand of fellowship, and agreed that we should work among the Gentiles, while they worked among the circumcised.

2:9, “James, Peter, and John, who seemed to be the leaders,” again recapitulates the question as to whether these leaders really were the leaders; 2:6 is thus reinforced. “… recognized that God has given me this special task,” reinforces yet again that Paul’s authority comes directly from God rather than from his own merely mortal enemies in Jerusalem. Paul implicitly repeats that his authority is higher than that of his enemies, because his enemies knew Jesus (1:1) “from man or by means of man,” while Paul did not. “… and so they shook hands with Barnabas and me, as a sign that we were all partners,” not only communicates, yet again, that Paul’s status within the group was at least equal to that of the authentic disciples, but asserts that Paul’s practices were validated by these supposed colleagues of his, at the council, so that Paul was fully accepted there as the “partner” of these individuals “who seemed to be the leaders” (2:6&9). “… and we agreed that Barnabas and I would work among the Gentiles and they among the Jews,” very subtly boosts Paul’s status yet again; instead of his saying here “… and they instructed us that Barnabas and I …,” he yet again implicitly denies what’s clearly the fact: that the Jerusalem elders were Paul’s “leaders,” little though Paul wanted explicitly to admit this. This passage also informs us that Paul and Barnabas were equals within the organization; probably the Galatians already knew that Barnabas’s status was at least as high as Paul’s; Paul was never one to downplay his status. Subsequent Christianity knows little of Barnabas; he has nothing in the canon, and only one epistle attributed to him in the apocrypha. However, it’s quite possible that Paul wasn’t even the leading evangelist to the Gentiles; we’ve no way of knowing independently of Paul and his followers, and these sources aren’t to be trusted on this. Paul’s implication here is that God made Paul the leading apostle to the Gentiles, and made Peter the leading apostle to the Jews. However, a later-written letter, Romans 11:13 (written to a congregation Paul hadn’t started, and which included some born Jews) claims only “I am an apostle to the Gentiles.” He doesn’t say there that he is “the” apostle to the Gentiles, because that sort of lie wouldn’t fly in Rome, where the congregants knew it’s not true. Paul was almost certainly the most successful salesman to the Gentiles, but there’s no indication he actually held authority over all other salesmen to Gentiles. However, unlike in Rome, probably the Galatians consisted virtually entirely of Gentiles who had no direct contact with Jesus’s disciples. So, they didn’t know. Paul was constantly expoiting their ignorance.

It should be pointed out here that the clause, “… that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised” repeats the respective assignments; and that – as in 2:3&7&8 – the important implicit equation is asserted here, of “the circumcised” with “the Jews,” and of “the uncircumcised” with “the Gentiles”; thus again demonstrating that circumcision was the central point at issue in the climax to come. Paul, in 2:3&7&8&9 refers to Jews as “the circumcised,” and contrasts them to the Gentiles. This is crucial: it consistently and repeatedly shows that the basic issue discussed at the council in Jerusalem was circumcision.

Another important feature of 2:7-9 is that this passage asserts that Paul would not be allowed to preach to the circumcised – that is, to born Jews – but only to people who were not. Wayne Lamar Harrington, at Harrington-sites.com, in his essay “Sacrificing Paul’s Credibility to Rescue Acts,” notes that this agreement is sufficient reason to disregard the numerous scholars who assert that Galatians 2 describes a different Jerusalem conference than does Acts 15. Harrington observes that, “To argue that Galatians 2:1-10 occurred during Paul’s alleged [in Acts] Jerusalem visit in Acts 11:27-30 & 12:25 is to completely dismiss what was agreed to in Galatians 2:1-10. For after that alleged visit the Paul of Acts continues to ‘go unto the circumcision,’ a clear violation to what is agreed to in” Galatians 2:7-9. (He cites there passages such as Acts 13:5, which assert that Paul and Barnabas “preached the word of God in the synagogues of the Jews” – which would clearly have violated Paul’s agreement with the disciples that’s indicated in Galatians.) Harrington also cites other evidence to show why any scholarly work that quotes Acts in preference to Paul’s authentic letters should be simply ignored as non-credible. He argued there as a legal/forensian instead of as a scholar. In any event, the only way Acts may permissibly be quoted when interpreting one of the authentic Pauline letters is when the given passage in Acts is entirely consistent with everything in those letters. Clearly, Acts 15 (to the extent that it possesses any historical value at all) refers to the same Jerusalem council as Galatians 2. Therefore, after the council in Jerusalem that’s referred to in Galatians 2, Paul wasn’t visiting congregations of born Jews, except possibly to defend the missionary work he was doing among Gentiles.

2:10 They requested only one thing: that we ought to keep in mind the poor in their group, and this was something I was actually eager to do.

2:10, “All they asked was that we should remember the needy in their group, which is the very thing I have been eager to do,” contrasts strikingly with the four conditions imposed upon Paul’s converts in Acts (repeated thrice: 15:20&29 and 21:25); however both versions, Paul’s and Luke’s, agree on the single critical issue, which is that circumcision, the subject of the debate, was not imposed. What we’re told is that James (and the other elders, in Paul’s account here) decided, at least for the time being, not to prohibit Paul from accepting into the sect uncircumcised males. Paul’s Gentile converts would be required, according to Paul’s account, to adhere to none of the covenant; Paul is claiming that the Jerusalem community had capitulated totally, and that Paul’s Gentile converts were totally freed from Jewish Law or covenant. By contrast, Acts says that Paul’s Gentile converts must adhere to the food and sexual laws of Leviticus 17 and 18, as well as to the food-law of Exodus 34:15 against eating food (meat) that has been sacrificed (slaughtered) in worship of idols, but that (Acts 15:19) “we should impose no irksome requirements upon those of the Gentiles who are turning toward God,” or, in other words, that these converts need not go under the knife. Also, Paul, in other documents which have much higher credibility than Acts, informs us that (1 Corinthians 5, 8, and 10) he had, in any case, been imposing upon his converts at least Leviticus 18 and Exodus 34:15; he accepted the food and certainly also the sexual laws, but definitely not the “irksome requirement,” as Acts 15:19 put it. Thus, it seems reasonable to assume here that if Acts 15:19-29 is truthful and Galatians 2:10 is false, then Paul was probably being required to impose only what he already was, and long had been, imposing upon his converts. Obviously, if Galatians 2:10 is true, then, yet again, Paul didn’t have to change a thing. So, according to both versions, there was no parting of the ways here. But, as was logically implied by the immediately following lines, James subsequently changed his mind in any case, and he and Paul promptly split apart into two different organizations and religions, one being James’s Jewish sect that faded from history, and the other being Paul’s Christian religion, that became the world’s largest.

From this point on, the tone in Paul’s account changes suddenly and dramatically; with no explanation from him as to why, his mood changes from one of cooperation to one of fierce hostility and outright war. No scholar has ever explained why; few have even tried to, or so much as even noted the striking and sudden change in tone; but you can see it for yourself; it’s blatant. The likeliest explanation for this abrupt souring of Paul’s tone is that he skips here a key intervening event: after Paul returns to Antioch, the debate within the Jerusalem community probably continued; but, in any case, James definitely did change his mind, for whatever reason, and he sent agents to Paul to instruct him that he must no longer accept the uncircumcised: They must be circumcised.

2:11 But when Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him in public, because he was clearly wrong.

2:12 Before some men who had been sent by James came, Peter was dining with the Gentile brothers, but when these men arrived, he withdrew from the table and refused to dine with the Gentiles, because he feared the circumcision party.

2:13 The other Jewish brothers joined Peter in this cowardice, so that even Barnabas joined their hypocrisy.

2:14 When I saw that they weren’t honest [in expressing their support for the gospel of Christ], I said to Peter, in front of them all:

“You are a Jew [i.e., circumcised], yet you have been living like a Gentile [i.e., as if you weren’t a Jew]. So, how can you try to force Gentiles to imitate [born] Jews?

2:15 “Although you and I are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners [i.e., not non-signers to the Jewish covenant, under the signatory law Genesis 17:11&14],

2:16 “We know that a person is viewed favorably by God only via Christ-faith, never by following God’s Law. Even we [you and I] have believed in Jesus Christ in order to be viewed favorably by God via Christ-faith, instead of by adhering to God’s Law. For no one can please God by following God’s Law.

2:17 “However, if our effort to please God by our union with Christ causes us to sin as the Gentiles do [since they didn’t even sign the covenant], does this mean that Christ is assisting us to sin? Of course not!

2:18 “For, if I were to rebuild the system [the Law] that I have torn down, then I would violate the [purpose of the] Law [which is personal salvation].

2:19 “I am dead to the Law, killed by the Law itself, in order that I might live for God. I have joined Christ’s death on the cross,

2:20 “So that it is no longer I who live, but Christ, who lives in me. I live this life by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave his life for me.

2:21 “I don’t nullify God’s grace; for, if God views a person favorably upon the basis of a man’s following God’s Law, then Christ died for nothing!”

This passage receives less attention from the general public than the passages in the canonical Gospels that allege to be quoting Jesus. The reason is: it’s not about Jesus, but instead concerns Jesus’s apostles/followers two decades later. However, this passage is actually far more important than those “red letter” passages. Unlike any of them, it was written earlier, and by an actual participant in the event it relates; and moreover it describes, in first-person witness testimony, a difference of opinion among top people within the Jesus-followers (e.g., between Peter and Paul). Paul is clashing here with Peter and with James’s other agents, concerning Jesus, whom both Peter and James knew, but whom Paul had never even met. (He claimed in 1:1 to have met only Jesus’s ghost.) This event really happened; it’s not like the mere allegations about “Jesus” in the Gospels, which are evangelical hearsay at best; this is instead actual witness testimony, by a participant. Paul’s slant on this event may be entirely untrustworthy, but will be stripped away regardless, so that a legal/forensic analysis will reconstruct from Paul’s account (and from all of the supplementary evidence in this case) a remarkably detailed and thoroughly reliable historical narrative of what actually occurred in this event.

Paul here explicitly condemns Peter, whom the Gospel-writers say was the leader of the Jesus-followers. Furthermore, the subject of this disagreement is whether or not God, after the Crucifixion, changed his mind about the Jewish covenant (“the Law”), and replaced it with Paul’s gospel of Christ – Christ-faith being Paul’s new path to personal salvation – since (2:16) “no one wins God’s approval by obeying God’s commandments [the Law, the Jewish covenant].” Paul states his case here, against Peter and the agents from James, concerning, essentially, the teachings of Jesus (whom, as we’ve noted, they had met, and Paul had not). The views of Peter and of James concerning these matters can far more reliably be reconstructed by means of a legal/forensic analysis of this passage than by means of any analysis of the letters in the New Testament that are attributed to Peter and to James, because the actual authorship of those letters from “Peter” and from “James” is unknown, and many scholars consider the letters from “Peter” and “James” to be bogus: written by anonymous forgers, after the deaths of both men. By contrast, this letter from Paul is virtually unanimously accepted as being authentic. So, here we not only possess the definitive statement regarding Paul’s position in this seminal conflict, but we also possess the most reliable evidence with which to be able to reconstruct, from this account, the opposed position, of both Peter and James, against which Paul is here arguing. Although subsequent Christianity (as canonized in the New Testament) stands with Paul, and against Peter and James, in this seminal dispute, and thus accepts Paul’s doctrine of salvation-via-Christ-faith, and repudiates as no longer valid the Jewish covenant (salvation-via-obedience-to-the-Law), serious question exists regarding whether that position accurately reflects Jesus’s views, because both Peter and James had known Jesus, while Paul – the proponent of this new covenant – had never met him.

2:11-21 doesn’t just state what Paul wanted his Galatian readers to believe, but it – more importantly for historians – recounts the first occasion at which Paul had asserted this startling doctrine (of salvation by mere faith), and presents this within the context of the circumstances (1:1-2:10) that had led up to and caused this first-ever assertion of it by Paul. This passage thus comprises his account of the climactic Antioch break with the Jerusalem community of Jesus-followers, the event – occurring during the year 49 or 50 – at which Paul’s followers and James’s followers were drawn to opposite poles, into communities with (as subsequent history has shown) drastically different fates: oblivion for the Jewish Jesus’s Jerusalem-oriented group led by James, and ultimate global dominance for the Rome-oriented group created and started from this point onward (not from the point of telling, but from the point being told about) by Paul. This passage culminates in 2:16, which announces “A person is viewed favorably by God only by possessing Christ-faith, never by obeying God’s commandments.” Paul there is rejecting Judaism (salvation via obeying God’s commandments) and replacing Judaism by Christianity (salvation via Christ-faith). Here he describes the circumstances that led him to do this – to introduce Christianity. For mysteriously unexplained reasons, Peter comes to Antioch, and Paul opposes him in public, concerning a subject that likewise remains tantalizingly unidentified. But, given 2:3-5, there can now hardly be doubt about what it had been that had driven Paul to confess, at the end of 2:2, “I did not want my work in the past and in the present to be a failure.” (Literally: “I did not want to have been, and to be, running [my race] in vain.” Paul resorted to such cryptic and obscure phraseology whenever he hoped that his audience wouldn’t understand what he was writing about. By his employing such phraseology, anyone who unfortunately already knew the truth couldn’t object and would credit him with being truthful, and anyone who didn’t would remain in the dark, as he wanted. So, no one would object, and yet he would actually yield nothing. This left him safe, and served his cause either way.) Furthermore, 2:3 makes clear that the thing that had aroused such intense opposition from Paul as to make him call his teacher Peter “hypocritical” and a “coward” was the threatened imposition of the circumcision-commandment (specifically, Genesis 17:14). And when Paul in 2:4 went so far as to charge, “They wanted to make slaves of us!” by imposing circumcision, the danger against his winning the race (2:2 and also 1 Corinthians 9:24, as well as Philippians 2:16 and 3:12-14) was starkly cast. Peter, in 2:11-12, is at first portrayed here as accepting of Paul’s uncircumcised “converts,” at least until (2:12) “some men who had been sent by James arrived.” Likewise mysteriously, Paul never states why James had sent them, or even what they did when they arrived. All that we’re informed of by Paul is that Peter “drew back and would not eat with the Gentiles, because he was afraid of those who were in favor of circumcising them.” But who were these “those”? Again, Paul doesn’t say; he leaves all of his meaning in this passage behind the lines, virtually none on the lines (which is the level that scholars have restricted themselves exclusively to). But, clearly, “those” refers here to the “agents from James.” This reveals a great deal; it reveals that James actually precipitated this blowup. And the law that Paul’s men were violating, the circumcision-law, had been the focus of the dispute at the council in Jerusalem leading up to this climactic moment. And the particular law that Peter was caught here by James’s men to have been violating might well have been Exodus 12:48-49, the law against ceremonially dining with uncircumcised men. Or else, Peter might have been considered by James’s men not to have been breaking any law at all; it’s enough that James’s backup team caught him dining with Paul’s men as if they were fellow members, when he was supposed to have been instead demanding them first to become members by being circumcised – not to treat them as if they were, until they were. What seems clear here is that Peter was caught violating his assignment from James. (If your Bible happens to be one that mistranslates this key passage of 2:12, to indicate Peter here fearing not proponents of circumcision, but instead fearing anyone who happens to be Jewish or “circumcised,” then you’ll probably find of interest the following box, “A Fine Point of Translation.” Otherwise, you might prefer to skip it.)

What was actually going on here? There is obviously a lot that’s hidden behind these lines. Let’s peel off the outer layer that scholars focus upon, and get to what’s really important: Paul doesn’t explicitly state why Peter had come to Antioch. Paul doesn’t explicitly state what the issue was between himself and Peter. Paul doesn’t explicitly state what the emissaries or agents from James had come this long way for. These are the basic things that must be understood in order to be able to understand this crucial passage, but Paul doesn’t explicitly answer ANY of these essential questions. Fortunately, however, they’re all IMPLICITLY answered, and not only by Paul’s text’s having offered mere SUGGESTIONS of what the actual case MIGHT have been, concerning which Paul was writing, but by LOGICALLY NECESSARY IMPLICATION indicating what the case actually and incontrovertibly WAS. (For a text to logically imply “x” is not for it to merely suggest “x” or indicate that “x” is probably the case, but is instead for it to assert that “x” is the case, no less powerfully than if the text explicitly asserted “x.” However, the differences between assertions that are explicit and assertions that are logically-necessarily implied will be discussed here subsequently.) We’ll now be developing this incontrovertible case.

But first: what can possibly explain Paul’s reasons for his not having explicitly ADDRESSED these central issues in his letter to the Galatians? And what can explain his having mentioned this blowup at all? What could have motivated him to have mentioned the incident to them, and yet NOT to have explicitly ANSWERED these BASIC questions about it for his Galatian readers?

To this matter, there’s only one answer that is at all likely to be correct:³⁸ Paul knows or believes that his Galatian congregations might have received, from the sect’s headquarters in Jerusalem – that is, from James’s emissaries – accounts of this event. Paul isn’t necessarily certain that his Galatian followers have been informed of the event by James’s people, but he can’t afford to take any CHANCES on that; he must ASSUME that they’ve been informed of the event, and by his ENEMIES. And he has to place his own spin on it here, yet without telling the Galatians anything more about the event than they probably already know of it from James’s people. Paul therefore has to walk a rhetorical tightrope here: he has to talk about this (to him) extremely embarrassing event, yet without explicitly saying just what it was; and he has to do it in such a way, or with such spin, that the only thing that explicitly comes out about the event, is HIS side of the dispute. Paul has to refer to a dispute without making explicit even that it really WAS a dispute; and, at the same time, he has to make explicit exactly what HIS side of that argument was. The letter to the Galatians has masterfully built up to this point, and the letter’s follow-through will be equally masterful, as we’ll see.

But the situation for Paul here is even dicier than this: he cannot afford to say anything against his actual opponent, James, explicitly, because he knows that his congregations look up to his opponent as possessing (for his readers) higher authority than he himself does. 2:12 indicates that the “representatives of James” carried such high authority as to be able to cause even Peter to back away from the table and join them against Paul. Peter, far from being the head of the sect, could even be called “cowardly,” “hypocritical,” and “wrong” by Paul, and everyone would accept his saying it; Paul wasn’t then attacked in return, for being insubordinate, even though he was denigrating his own teacher (according to 1:18), Peter. Paul could publicly attack Peter, but could not publicly attack James. Paul, as was previously documented, had been converting Gentiles into James’s Jewish sect, not into Paul’s new religion; and Peter had come here on a mission from James. James’s people had caught Peter violating this mission in some way. Paul’s challenge now was to defend his ground against James, who could not be attacked, and also against Peter, who could be attacked; so, Paul attacked Peter. This is also the reason for all of Paul’s earlier references, leading up to his description of the actual event, in which he had asserted that perhaps the acknowledged leaders weren’t really the leaders in the eyes of God (e.g., 2:6). Paul needed to tear down the leaders’ authority as representatives of Jesus, but to do this job in such a way that he wouldn’t invite being attacked in return. Likewise, in 2 Corinthians 11:5 & 12:11, he twice told his congregants (only in a different geographical region), “I am not at all inferior to those special ‘apostles’ of yours.” No one would have replied “Yes you are inferior to them!” which would have seemed to his congregants a cruel rebuke to the very man who had brought them into the sect.

In other words: Here were “agents from James,” and Peter – Paul’s own teacher in the mission to the Gentiles – and Paul is telling his readers who are followers in the mission to the Gentiles, in essence: I, who brought you into this group, had a disagreement with those men who preceded me and who even taught me, and they were wrong and I was right about Jesus.

The rhetorical burden Paul faced here was almost impossible to overcome, but subsequent history proves to us that he nonetheless succeeded and overcame it.

Since Paul’s “converts” had originally seen themselves as having converted not to Paul’s organization, but to James’s, Paul now had to work very hard, AFTER the split, in order to keep these nominal “converts” to the Jesus-sect of Jews, as ACTUAL converts to his own NEW religion (which is represented here by 2:16-21). He had to make the process, of conversion away from Judaism, as imperceptible to them as possible. Implicitly, Paul had been working, up to this point in his letter, repeatedly upon his Galatian readers, to get them to doubt that James really DID possess higher authority than himself. Now will come the PAYOFF from all that work.

Consequently, too, while Paul is here criticizing Peter explicitly, he still can’t lay a rhetorical hand on James explicitly. The emissaries from James appear explicitly in Paul’s account almost as only an incidental detail (in 2:12), rather than as the MOTIVE FORCE in this entire incident that they IMPLICITLY clearly were. People with a weak sense of a given text’s internal logic³⁹ will hardly even NOTICE from Paul’s account here that James’s agents are important, much less, central, to what’s going on in this passage – nor that this passage is the most important one in the entire New Testament, as we shall here prove. Paul would probably have loved to have poured out here his hatred against James’s agents, but he couldn’t very well have done that, since this letter’s Galatian readers knew that these “agents from James” were from their own sect’s head. Later, however, in 4:17-21, Paul can SAFELY make negative reference to such agents who had been sent NOT to him, Paul, but, on that other occasion, to THEM, his congregants. He’s under no such constraint in THAT case, because, there, to malign James’s agents isn’t explicitly to set Paul himself against the readers’ own sect’s leader; the opposition in 4:17-21 is instead implicitly between, on the one hand, the Galatians themselves, and on the other, James’s agents as their enemy. Yet more implicitly, in 4:17-21, if the Galatians themselves thought of those agents as being representatives from James – which is likely – then Paul is here painting James as actually HIS READERS’ OWN ENEMY, without Paul’s so much as even MENTIONING James’s name: as was noted, he couldn’t lay a rhetorical hand against James. And so he did not. Paul’s behavior here is supremely tactful.

Paul in 4:17-21 portrays these agents from James ever-so-gingerly as sneaky and downright evil, by saying, “Those other people show a deep interest in you, but their intentions are not good. All they want is to separate you from me, so that you will have the same interest in them as they have in you. Now, it is good to have such a deep interest if the purpose is good – this is true always, and not merely when I am with you. My dear children! Once again, like a mother in childbirth, I feel the same kind of pain for you until Christ’s nature is formed in you. How I wish I were with you now, so that I could take a different attitude toward you. I am so worried about you!” Paul here skillfully analogizes himself to their own loving MOTHER, and his concern for them as being like a mother’s natural concern that some evil-intentioned person (James) will take the child away from her. But never does Paul explicitly MENTION James in such aspersions – only James’s agents – and the reason is simply that, until the event that Paul recounts in 2:11-16, Paul had himself been selling these same Galatian readers on James’s organization. So, now, he has to wean them AWAY from that, and to portray James’s agents as, essentially, loose wheels, yet without ever explicitly indicating to his readers that this is what he’s trying to do to them. Also in 1 Corinthians 3:1-2, he reminded the Corinthians that when he first converted them to Judaism, “I had to feed you milk and not solid food, because you were not ready for it. And even now you aren’t, because you still focus more on this world than on the next.” (His reference there, to “the next,” exhibited his emphasis, shown in Galatians 1:1 and elsewhere, on the afterlife, above real life.)

Paul had, perhaps just a few years prior to this Galatian letter, employed a similar tactic with the Thessalonians, saying in 1 Thessalonians 2:7-8, from this Thessalonian letter that many scholars date immediately prior to the one Paul wrote to the Galatian community, “When we were with you, we were gentle, like a mother taking care of her children. Because of our love for you, we have shared with you not only the Good News [the gospel], but ourselves. You are so dear to us!”

Then, just a few lines later in this Thessalonian letter, in 2:14-16, he spoke of “the Jews” (UNNAMED of whom being PRINCIPALLY James) who “even tried to stop us from preaching to the Gentiles [including to these very same readers] the message that would bring them salvation,” etc. That “stop us from preaching” line was referring PRECISELY TO THIS EVENT recounted in Galatians 2:11-16. That’s why 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 was so impassioned; it referred to this recent climactic event in Paul’s life. In fact, when Paul said there that “the Jews … even tried to stop us from preaching the message which would bring salvation to the Gentiles,” he was referring to James and the “agents from James” in Galatians 2:12. This was the only place in all of Paul’s writings where he referred to James’s change-of-mind about the necessity of imposing Genesis 17:14 upon Paul’s “converts” to Judaism. Even here, he veiled what he was saying, and the reason is clear: He couldn’t afford to be explicit that James had changed his mind about this.

Furthermore, fascinating additional supporting evidence of the development of Paul’s thinking is provided in 1 Thessalonians, which is the only surviving whole epistle that Paul is generally considered to have produced before Galatians. According to the scholarly consensus, 1 Thessalonians was written in or about 50 CE, only shortly after the council in Jerusalem. If that view is correct, then this letter would have exhibited Paul’s thinking SOON AFTER THE SPLIT, but yet possibly BEFORE his outright war against Judaism had started. The hostility would have been there, but it would have been held in CHECK if there still were felt to remain some possibility of an ultimate rapprochement between Paul and the Jerusalem elders. And 1 Thessalonians does reflect precisely such a transitional state. Paul, in this letter, doesn’t attack Judaism at all. (He restricts his attacks there to Jews, in 2:14-16, but – unlike in his much later-written Philippians, in its line 3:8 that calls Judaism itself trash – he doesn’t attack Judaism, because what he had initially SOLD these people on, just so SHORT a time before, was itself a VARIETY of JUDAISM: THE NEW SECT JESUS HAD STARTED.) To the contrary, in 4:1-12, he reminds the Thessalonians, “you have learned from us how you should live in order to please God,” and he then proceeds to tell them that, if they will adhere to the Jewish covenant, they WILL please God. 4:7-8 even says, “God did not call us to live in immorality, but in holiness. Therefore, whoever rejects this teaching is rejecting not man, but God.” That’s Judaism, pure and simple, he was preaching there (salvation via adhering to God’s commandments), in this earliest of his surviving letters, written right after the split. But, just a few lines later, in 4:15-17, Paul informs the Thessalonians of “what we are teaching you now [the emphasis here being mine],” which is, 4:16, “Those who have died believing in Christ will be the first [again, my emphasis] to be raised to eternal life” on Judgment Day; and this, of course, is Paul’s new, Christian, covenant, NOT the old, Jewish, one. Only it’s an importantly different version from the one he subsequently taught (such as in Galatians 2:16): it’s not yet a supersessionist one (though trending in that direction – i.e., toward replacing the Jewish one – on account of his placing it “first”). When Paul wrote this to the Thessalonians, he wasn’t saying that the Jewish pathway to heaven has been superseded by the Christian pathway, but that it co-exists with the Christian pathway. Implicitly, then, 1 Thessalonians presents a two-covenant, or two-pathways, theory of salvation, even though a two-pathways theory that gives the new, Christian, pathway first preference in the Pauline God’s view.

Here, then, is important documentary evidence of the evolution or development of Paul’s teaching, changes that were exquisitely calculated by him to meet his changing tactical challenges, and where he outsmarted not only his enemies, such as James, but even his friends, including scholars right down till the present day. Scholars, even today, remain so balled-up in their controversies about what Paul’s message was, that they don’t realize that – and how – Paul’s message changed, both over time, and to different audiences (Christian and Jew). The reason for this confusion is that scholars haven’t had legal/forensic methodology. (Most scholars thus used the vastly inferior evidence, Acts, to track Paul’s development, and this has caused endless confusions in their interpretations of Paul.)

Prior to the split, Paul’s challenge was to make his followers think that circumcision was optional in Judaism; after the split (once he had finally lost that challenge), his challenge was even bigger: to bring these people over into Paul’s own, entirely new, religion, yet without letting them know that he was doing this to them.

Another indication that tends to date this letter, to the Thessalonians, soon after the council in Jerusalem, is the letter’s opening with 1:1, “From Paul, Silas, and Timothy”: Acts 15:40-16:3 says that Silas and Timothy JOINED Paul for a missionary journey that took place SOON AFTER the council in Jerusalem; and so, if that’s true, Silas and Timothy accompanied Paul shortly after the council in Jerusalem. Also, 16:3 indicates that Timothy wasn’t circumcised, but that Paul REQUIRED HIM TO BE CIRCUMCISED in order to join Paul on this trip. If this is true, then Paul probably felt confident that Timothy’s commitment was sufficiently strong for Timothy to be able to accept the intense pain and danger that circumcision entailed. Paul’s alleged requirement of circumcision here provides strong external support to 1 Thessalonians reflecting Paul’s transition from the split to the war. The circumcision of Timothy makes sense ONLY within the context of Paul’s having been in transit between those two phases. That would likewise fit perfectly with Paul’s transitional two-gospels message in 1 Thessalonians 4:1-16. However, Acts 17:1-2 implies that this journey was Paul’s first that took him to Thessalonica itself; and this superior evidence, Paul’s own letter 1 Thessalonians, indicates that’s incorrect; Paul had converted these Thessalonians to James’s Jewish sect years earlier than his follower “Luke” (the author of Acts) knew.

Even the Gospel that was written the latest, and that is generally considered to be the most anti-Semitic, John, had to acknowledge, in the late period in which it was written, that Jesus was passionately a Jew: John 4:22 quotes its “Jesus” as asserting “[only] we [Jews] know whom we worship, because salvation comes from the Jews.” And, of course, Matthew similarly quoted Jesus as asserting to his disciples (Mat. 10:5-6), “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, … but go instead to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” (As was earlier noted, Matthew quoted the after-death Jesus as changing his mind on that, in Matthew 28:19-20.) Again: Paul’s followers could go far in their lies; but, even for them, limits existed on just how far they could safely afford to go.

It’s interesting that, if Acts was correct about Paul’s having Timothy circumcised in 16:3, then Paul’s immediate response to James’s command was, at least to that extent, to make this concession to it. Such a concession would suggest that immediately after the event recounted in Galatians 2:11-21, Paul accommodated that command to the extent he thought necessary in order to avoid provoking James into proclaiming publicly that Paul’s followers weren’t Jews and therefore weren’t followers of Jesus (because they weren’t circumcised). Paul was now set upon gradually removing his followers from the Jesus sect. By Paul’s moving only gradually away from the covenant, he avoided providing James a public provocation that might have compelled James to expel Paul from the sect before Paul could stand as an authority on his own, amongst his own. Evidently, by the time Paul wrote Galatians, he felt sufficiently confident to do this – to tell his followers that they would be lost to Christ if they became circumcised. (In fact, in Galatians 5:4, Paul says precisely this: “If you seek salvation through obedience to the Law, you will be severed from Christ and from God’s favor.”) What he had said in the incident he recounted in Galatians 2:11-21 was thus now suitable, approximately four years later, to repeat to these men as being “the gospel of Christ.” No one in human history has been so effective a strategist and tactician as was Paul; his sense of timing was like a finely crafted timepiece, inside a bomb.

Further indications of the changes in Paul’s message over time are provided by the two Corinthians letters, both of which are mixtures of more than one letter written at different times to the Corinthian congregations. The editor(s) who assembled these letters did so in patchquilt fashion. 1 7:19 has to be from the period prior to the split, even prior to 1 Thessalonians, because Paul here instructs his people, “Whether a man is circumcised is not important; only obeying God’s commandments is important.” That directly contradicts Galatians 2:16. In this Corinthians passage, Paul displays himself from the period before the blow-up, the period when he was collecting uncircumcised converts and telling them to follow the Law but that the circumcision law was an exception and could be ignored. This is further conclusive evidence that Paul’s “gospel of Christ” did indeed change over time, and that Paul is brazenly lying when he says in Galatians 1:7, “there is only one gospel of Christ, but others are trying to change it,” and in the following two lines, “Anyone who preaches a gospel different from what I taught you should go to hell!” Paul is there consigning himself to hell, because he had, indeed, earlier taught that only the circumcision-commandment is invalid, and that the rest of the Jewish covenant remains in force, even after Jesus’s death. Paul’s having asserted in 1 Corinthians 7:19 “Whether a man is circumcised is not important; only obeying God’s commandments is important” provides further proof to our central point that Paul in Galatians 2:16 is actually rejecting the covenant because he rejects Genesis 17:14, and isn’t, as he claims there, rejecting Genesis 17:14 because he rejects the covenant – in other words, it’s further proof that Paul in Galatians 2:16-21 was simply lying to Peter and to James’s other representatives, and to Paul’s own men, and that his Christianity is thus nothing but a hoax built upon his understandable refusal to impose circumcision on his followers. Christianity’s fraudulence is there incontrovertible.⁴⁰ In this passage 1 Corinthians 7:19, Paul obviously hasn’t yet been compelled to apply Genesis 17:14 as being one of God’s commandments; James hasn’t yet made the decision to enforce it. Paul’s gospel after the split became exactly the opposite of “only obeying God’s commandments is important.” His new “gospel” is instead Christ-faith; not at all “obeying God’s commandments.” What Paul said in 1 Corinthians 7:19 was that the circumcision commandment can be ignored and the believer can still be “obeying God’s commandments.” That, of course, is precisely the position of the pre-split Paul. According to Acts 11:2-18, it was also precisely Peter’s position prior to Peter’s abandoning the mission to the Gentiles and his leaving that to Barnabas and Paul. Moreover, 1 Corinthians 7:20 completes this statement by adding “Everyone should remain as he was when he accepted God’s call.” In other words, yet again: One doesn’t have to become circumcised in order to be “obeying God’s commandments.” The tensions within the sect, over circumcision, had obviously not yet come to a head then. When Paul wrote this, he and James and Peter were all of a single mind on this, that these uncircumcised men were Jews. It was the easy way to collect Gentiles. And even 2 Corinthians contains some pre-split lines. 2 12:1-6 says (12:2) that Paul’s conversion to Jesus (the mythological account of this Damascus-road experience being famously provided in Acts 9:3-22) had occurred 14 years prior, which would certainly date this particular passage of the second Corinthian letter three years prior to the split, and thus, also, even earlier than 1 Thessalonians. This fascinating early-written passage, providing us a window into Paul’s teachings before the split, alternates between first-person and third-person references to his subsequently-made-famous Damascus-road conversion experience. It even admits that that experience might not have been authentically supernatural or revelatory at all (such as he subsequently implied it to be, and such as Luke in Acts 9:3-19 asserted it to have been). Evidently, at such an early period in Paul’s ministry, when he was still loyally following James’s leadership and functioning in the Jesus-sect rather than in his subsequent Christianity, Paul was willing to admit then that the “revelation” he had had from the Risen Christ might have been purely imaginary or delusional. Only after the split, when, as the founder of an entirely new religion, it was absolutely essential for him to claim direct authorization from the Risen Christ (inasmuch as he had always previously admitted that he had never known the living Jesus), did Paul insist, as in Galatians 1:1, that his authorization definitely came “from Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised Him from death.” However, back again to 2 Corinthians, line 3:6 was clearly written after the split, saying that, “the new covenant consists not of a written Law but of the Spirit. The written Law brings death, but the Spirit gives life.” (The King James Version mistranslates this “new covenant” as “new testament,” but the new testament didn’t even exist until it was canonized in the 4th Century, so Paul couldn’t have been referring to it. Moreover, even the KJV elsewhere translates the very same term here from the original, “diatheke,” as “covenant,” such as in Galatians 3:17, and in Romans 11:27.) This “new covenant” reflects emphatically the supersessionist, Christian, Paul; he more commonly calls this supersessionist covenant the “gospel of Christ.” 2 11:13-15 is probably also from after the split, if it implicitly condemns both James and his followers as being agents of Satan. However, it doesn’t necessarily include James in its denunciation here, because only James’s followers are directly attacked (James didn’t visit the Corinthian congregation; only his agents did), and it’s possible that these followers weren’t presenting James’s position but only their interpretation of it – there was, as yet, no definitive statement of what James’s position on circumcision was, until after the council in Jerusalem and its final decision reflected in Galatians 2:11-13, which changed everything. Until that time came, it remained possible for James’s followers to disagree amongst themselves about whether or not uncircumcised men could be followers of Jesus – members of the Jesus sect of Jews. Clearly, 2 Corinthians 11:13-15 exhibits Paul’s being at war against some of James’s followers, but we cannot tell for certain from that passage whether Paul was at war against all of James’s followers at the time. Also after the split was such a passage as 1 Corinthians 15:56-57, “Death gets its power to hurt from sin, and sin gets its power from the Law. But God deserves our gratitude for granting us victory over death via our Lord Jesus Christ.” So, whereas in 1 15:56, “Sin gets it power from the Law” (i.e., from the commandments), 1 7:19 tells us that, “Only obeying the commandments is important.” 1 15:56 condemns “the Law” (the commandments) as the enabler of sin, and this intellectual contortion was a direct outgrowth of the event Paul describes in Galatians 2:11-21. Also, the passage that opens 1 Corinthians is clearly from after the split: 1 Corinthians 1:2-3 is similar to Galatians 1:1 in its placing Jesus with God.

Nonetheless, despite the obvious patchwork nature of the two canonical Corinthians letters, each of them provides useful information, not otherwise available, concerning Paul’s position prior to the split. Each of these two letters contains some material that clearly pre-dates the split. And this material is exceptionally valuable from a historical standpoint, because none of Paul’s other surviving letters does. One can only speculate as to why such passages survived – perhaps it was because the Corinthian congregation was Paul’s first, and because the members were proud to be asked by Rome, long afterward, to supply whatever they still possessed from Paul, and the person or persons to whom this task was assigned had available to him only incomplete shreds and tried to form continuous letters from them, and this is the best that he could achieve with the shreds he still had at hand. Perhaps he furthermore recognized that, if he failed to do a credible job of this, then Rome wouldn’t include anything from Paul to the Corinthians in the final collection. Here was an opportunity for this man to shape future world history. He did what he could toward that end. In any event, whoever performed the task succeeded: the Pauline materials he supplied were accepted and ultimately canonized.

Contrast 1 Corinthians 7:19 versus Galatians 5:2-4. In the former, from prior to the split, “whether or not a man is circumcised means nothing; what matters is to obey God’s commandments.” But in the latter, “if you permit yourself to be circumcised, … you are outside God’s grace.”

And there we have it: incontrovertible testimony, even from the pre-split Paul – Paul’s testimony from prior to his invention of Christianity – proving beyond any reasonable doubt whatsoever, not only that Paul lied when he said in Galatians 1:7-9 that he had never changed his gospel, but also that Paul invented Christianity at the event he described in Galatians 2:11-21, and that “table fellowship” and other distractions upon which scholars focus there, had nothing to do with 2:11-21, but that circumcision had everything to do with it. Scholars want to believe, virtually as much as preachers do; and, in any case, there hasn’t been any significant distinction between those two professions: both are anti-science. What’s the difference between a professor of New Testament at a seminary and at a university? Legal/forensic analysis of the evidence proves conclusively that Christianity is simply a hoax, which started at that specific occasion, in or around the year 50, at Antioch.

This contrast also proves, yet again and with finality, that circumcision, not the food laws, constituted the only part of the Law that Paul hadn’t been imposing upon his followers. In other words: yet again, there’s simply no question that the debate in 2:11-21, between Paul on the one hand, and Peter and the other agents from James on the other, concerned whether or not Genesis 17:14 remained binding after the crucifixion.

This interpretation of the evidence is consistent with all of the evidence. By contrast, the scholars’ interpretations are not. No interpretation which assumes that Paul was honest is consistent with all of the evidence. The assumption of Paul’s honesty isn’t only extraneous: it’s false. It certainly wouldn’t be admissible in court as an assumption, but would require proof; and the proof runs in the opposite direction, as shown here.⁴¹

Scholars, when they interpret a text, usually ignore instead of explain contradictions that it contains. This alone suffices to disqualify their interpretations, from a legal/forensic standpoint, because a case built from evidence that contains unexplained contradictions is nonsense. And, in order to make 100% sense, a case must credibly explain all contradictions within the evidence. So, that’s the goal here. No previous “historical” work on earliest Christianity has come anywhere near to meeting this basic standard of legal/forensic acceptability. They’re all merely myths that are based upon myths.

What, then, can we say about the event itself – what actually happened at the event that created Christianity?

Circumcision is the issue before the event, and the issue after it; circumcision is also the issue in the event itself.

In 2:11, Peter is coming to Antioch, shortly after James at the council in Jerusalem had produced his initial judgment on the circumcision-issue, a judgment that, whatever its specifics (which are uncertain), did, at least for the time being, permit Paul to continue with his uncircumcised “converts” as being, at least for the time being, actual converts. We know, however: whatever Peter at Antioch said in 2:11, disturbed Paul greatly, and Paul opposed Peter about this matter in public – that is to say, in front of his own followers. Even though it was an embarrassing thing for Paul to have to admit to the Galatians, that he had been standing opposed to his onetime mentor Peter on this occasion, he probably had to admit it, out of fear that they might already have known as much from James’s representatives who had been sent to their OWN congregations. We know that James had, in fact, sent representatives to the Galatian congregations, because Paul refers to those agents in 1:6-9, 4:17-21, and also in 5:2-12 (which will be discussed here subsequently). But even if Paul hadn’t known about and referred to those agents, there would have been no way for him to have known for certain that his enemy had not sent any. Paul therefore simply couldn’t afford the risks he would have faced if he had altogether avoided referring to this climactic incident, despite his strong desire not to do so; and this is the reason why he refers to it. (This explains why the proof of Christianity’s being a hoax, Galatians 2:11-16, exists; this explains why Paul mentioned the incident at all in this letter. This thus also explains our extreme good fortune now, which enables a Scientific Age world to recognize the hoax, after 2,000 years of Paul’s unremitting success in it.)

Then, in 2:12, Paul explicitly states that, whatever this dispute was between Peter and Paul, Peter nonetheless did sit down to dinner, presumably that same evening, to dine with Paul and his uncircumcised “converts.” We know that these “converts” had not been circumcised, because James at Jerusalem had ruled that, at LEAST until he might subsequently decide otherwise, no such circumcisions would be REQUIRED. We can infer from Peter’s sitting down to dinner with Paul and his “converts,” that, whatever the point-at-issue between Paul and Peter might have been, the two had subsequently calmed down and emerged from their dispute in at least a civil accord, even IF the point-at-issue here remained unsettled between them. From 2:12, we learn explicitly that while Peter was dining with these men, emissaries from James arrived, and that their arrival is what precipitated Peter’s sudden withdrawal from the table. If these emissaries were actually a backup team that was sent by James in order to make certain that Peter – despite (according to Acts 15:7-11) his having SUPPORTED Paul’s position against circumcision at the just-recently-past council in Jerusalem – would, in fact, now be “laying down the law” AGAINST Paul’s position, and making clear to Paul and his “converts” that, finally, these men must all be circumcised, then these emissaries would probably have been SHOCKED to see Peter actually DINING with these very same uncircumcised “converts.” In Judaism, dining is an act with much religious significance (God had legislated about it: the kosher laws), and a strict Jew, especially in that ancient era (when strict Jews were even stricter than they are today), might well have considered it to be improper to dine with NON-Jews, especially at ceremonial meals, or else at meals on especially Jewish-significant occasions – which this event certainly was for members of this Jewish sect, since the Jewish identity of these men is what Peter was now challenging and what Paul was defending. This question of Jews dining with non-Jews was no personal rejection of non-Jews; Jews (like members of almost every religion) were, and are, customarily EAGER for others to join their religion. This rejection of codining reflected Jewish Law, the covenant, in this case the principle that, unless a person had ALREADY JOINED their faith, dining with non-believers was of doubtful obedience to God, perhaps by extension from the principle emphatically set forth in Exodus 12:48-9, regarding the celebratory Passover meal: “If a foreigner lives amongst you, and wants to observe the Passover to honor the Lord, all his males must first be circumcised, and then he may come near and observe it, and he will even be as one who is born Jewish – for no uncircumcised person may join in the meal. The same law will apply to the native-born as to the foreigner who is a friend amongst you.”

Consequently, given the specific background of this climactic occasion, James’s emissaries would almost certainly have felt that they were catching Peter “with his pants down,” as it were; and Peter, very understandably, thus drew himself away from the table in embarrassment, to reassert here his loyalty to James.

Now, we come to what the issue here was, and this is the issue that’s addressed in detail in the preceding box: this issue was Peter’s having been caught dining WITH UNCIRCUMCISED MEN. (The issue was not Paul’s having set an un-kosher table, as scholars assume.)⁴² Of course, Peter had himself done the very same thing many times before, in his youth, when he had been Paul’s predecessor and subsequent mentor in the mission to the Gentiles (such as in Acts 11:3), and had done, in that capacity, just as Paul was now doing – accepted non-circumcised men as members. But that was before the question had been finally decided by James, and it was also many years ago; and what Peter was now doing, on this occasion, was a direct VIOLATION of the reason for which James had SENT Peter to Antioch. James’s wisdom in having sent a BACKUP team, to arrive a few hours after Peter, was thereby confirmed: Peter exhibited himself to be not a man who could be depended upon.

When scholars, as they wrongly but widely do, assume that the reason why Peter withdrew from the table was that James’s men found him dining at an un-kosher table (in violation of Judaism’s laws regarding food), they depart entirely from the evidence. Their assumption here is that Paul favored fellowship with people who violated the food laws, whereas James didn’t and tried to impose here the food laws. Exodus 12:48-49, the law against ceremonially dining with uncircumcised men, had nothing to do with the food laws, and yet even at as late a time as Luke’s writing of Acts 11:3, there was evidently widespread public recognition that during that era Jews considered dining with uncircumcised men to be sinful, a violation of God’s Law, perhaps a violation of Exodus 12:48-49. And so, the mere assumption by scholars that the food laws were the source of the disagreement motivating Galatians 2:12, is utterly unwarranted: there’s no basis for it at all.

Now we proceed to 2:13, which explicitly states that Paul’s group at the table included not only Gentiles, but Jews (who had been circumcised as infants), and that these people joined James’s side in this dispute, and that EVEN Paul’s important co-worker (and possibly boss) Barnabas joined the James side. Here, then, is the IMPLICIT situation: It was, now, on the one side of the conflict, Peter, and the other agents from James, and Barnabas, and even those men who were born Jews but who were in Paul’s own operation; and, on the OTHER side, there was ONLY Paul, accompanied by his leading Gentile “converts.” This was, in other words, a microcosmic model of the same great schism that the event itself PRECIPITATED – a schism that, for the first time ever, now publicly rocked Paul’s Antioch headquarters.

2:14 explicitly presents Paul arguing against Peter, since Peter is the senior-most person present. Peter is here no longer Paul’s mentor, but rather his FOE. Paul reminded Peter that what Peter was doing here was in direct violation of Peter’s OWN practice when Peter had been evangelizing to the Gentiles, and was also in violation of what Peter had been standing for till this very moment. (Note here that Acts 11:2-3 asserts that the issue decades earlier, when Peter instead of Paul was ministering to the Gentiles, concerned circumcision and not the food laws. The assumption by scholars that for some unstated reason this changed and now the food laws had become the source of friction, has no other basis than scholars wanting to interpret 2:14 in this unfounded way; it is simply and quite clearly false.) We can reasonably assume that Peter would likely have retorted to Paul something like, “That was then, Paul, and this is now, and James has finally decided against that policy, and I am therefore honor-bound, as a follower of Jesus, to obey the mashiach’s appointed successor, James,⁴³ and so to separate myself from you on this matter.” Would Peter have gone the very next step, to have asserted the ultimate split between the two of them, “If you do not comply, Paul, then you and your people are no longer a part of our sect”? Would a vacillating, accommodating, man, such as virtually all accounts of Peter describe him to have BEEN, have been likely to say such a thing? Hardly. Furthermore, his FAILURE to have said that is probably why Peter had sat down to dinner with these people in the first place, and so been “caught with his pants down” on this matter. Peter didn’t confront them. But Paul’s account doesn’t – not ever – give his OPPONENTS’ side on this supremely important matter; a con-artist does not DO such a thing unless he’s stupid, and Paul was anything but stupid: he was as cunning as anyone in all of history.

Scholars have widely picked up on Paul’s accusation in 2:14 that Peter was trying to force Gentiles to imitate Jews (“ioudaizein”), and scholars have used this sole occasion on which Paul employed that term (“ioudaizein”) as constituting their supposed justification to label Paul’s opponents as having been “Judaizers,” which means people who try to convert others to Judaism, but that’s not what Paul was alleging, not even on the sole occasion in which he used the term “ioudaizein.” He didn’t call Peter a “Judaizer” in this line, nor did he ever employ any such term anywhere; i.e., he never alleged that Peter – or anyone – had preached for Jesus by demanding that a listener must “Judaize,” or become a Jew who preaches Judaism to others. In fact, that’s not the way anyone preached for Jesus in those times. Among Jews, the missionary message during Jesus’s life was that Jesus was the prophesied mashiach; and, after Jesus’s crucifixion, it was that Jesus had been a Jewish prophet. Among Gentiles, the missionary message during Jesus’s life didn’t even exist, and the message after the crucifixion was that Jesus had been the Jewish prophet who represented God for those – and all future – times. As long as the latter message didn’t require a listener to subject himself to the medical operation of circumcision, it was acceptable to Gentiles, and was far more acceptable to them than the message of the vast majority of missionaries of Judaism, who (in accord with Genesis 17:14) did require circumcision as a pre-requisite for salvation. All of Jesus’s disciples were Jews and remained Jews, just as Jesus himself was and did; and, in their time, it was taken for granted that anyone who preached for Jesus among Gentiles was hoping to convert them to Judaism, because that was the religion Jesus had preached and they were preaching. For Paul to have accused Peter of Judaizing (i.e., of preaching Judaism) would have been ridiculous, because until this moment that’s what all people – including both Peter and Paul – who claimed to be preaching for Jesus were doing. Instead, Paul accused Peter here of his trying to make Gentiles imitate Jews or practice Judaism – which is what “ioudaizein” meant. To understand how this would have been understood by his readers: Paul’s followers were born Gentiles who thought that they were practicing Judaism except for the circumcision-commandment, and Paul’s argument here was that that sufficed – and this was the issue in the dispute here, not whether Peter (and James’s other representatives) were “trying to force Gentiles to Judaize,” or to force them to preach Judaism, which is a wildly fictitious translation of this Greek word. The only reason scholars here interpret “ioudaizein” that absurd and false way (as preaching – rather than as practicing – Judaism) is that this tactic has been central to their various defenses of Paul: i.e., that his opponents were “Judaizers” – a concept one doesn’t find anywhere in Paul’s writings. When Paul said that Peter was trying to make Gentiles imitate born Jews, he was understood by everyone present to mean here that Peter was trying to make Gentile followers of Jesus become circumcised, because that was the only law of Judaism Paul’s men weren’t already following. But Paul didn’t want to say this explicitly – he didn’t want to name circumcision as the specific Jewish law that was at issue – because he didn’t want his followers to know that circumcision had been the issue at the just-completed council in Jerusalem. So, he used instead this more-general term, “ioudaizein,” as if the issue there had been whether or not one must follow Jewish customs, in a generic sense. Like the greatest of salesmen, Paul calibrated each word he used. And, as advocates for Paul, scholars might have, as their chief (or even only) reason for alleging that Paul’s opponents “Judaized” among the Gentile converts, that this allegation – though it’s entirely unsourced in all of Paul’s writings – enables scholars to avoid recognizing that Paul’s opponents demanded that his followers become circumcised in accord with Genesis 17:14 as a pre-condition for membership in Jesus’s (or any) sect of Judaism. The allegation, from scholars, that Paul’s opponents “Judaized,” leaves the door open for interpreting the cause of the council in Jerusalem in 2:1-10, and of the ensuing conflict in 2:11-21, as having been disputes over other commandments from God, not over the circumcision-commandment. But if Paul had accused his opponents of forcing people to “Judaize,” he would have been laughed at by his readers in his own time.

Furthermore, 2:14 provides two high quality evidences that the Roman Catholic Church outright falsifies (and that its Gospel Scriptures mislead) that Peter was the first Pope: first, Peter was being upbraided here by Paul, which obviously wouldn’t have been accepted by anyone present, if Peter were, in fact, the leader of Jesus’s followers; and, second, Peter was described here by Paul as preaching Judaism (or, according to the many “Judaize” scholars, even as preaching the preaching of Judaism), which clearly wouldn’t have been done by the first (or any) Pope. Is Roman Catholicism a sect of Judaism? Obviously not. Yet, even as late as the year 50, Jesus’s disciples (and, according to the myth that Peter was the leading disciple, even the leader among them) were preaching Judaism – not Christianity, not Roman Catholicism. So: Peter wasn’t the first Pope, such as the Roman Catholic Church claims; and Peter preached Judaism, instead of Christianity, and so the Roman Catholic Church has no authentic connection whatsoever to Jesus’s disciples. 2:14 thus proves, yet again, that Christianity is a hoax. 2:14 displays this, and doesn’t merely assert this; it is conclusive. 2:14 destroys Roman Catholicism, and leaves Christianity no foundation except lies. 2:14 is dispositive against Roman Catholicism in particular, and against Christianity in general.

But Paul now goes on to give us even more: He proceeds to announce the end of what had actually been Jesus’s religion, Judaism, and its replacement by Paul’s own new religion, Christianity:

2:15-16 continues with what was almost certainly what Paul had said next in his self-defense – and in defense of his viewpoint – on the occasion he was now recounting: “Indeed, we are Jews by birth and not ‘Gentile sinners’ [meaning people who can be PRESUMED to be violators of the covenant, because they’ve not signed the covenant – via circumcision – to BECOME Jews]. Yet we know that a person is put right in the view of God only by means of Christ-faith,⁴⁴ and never by doing what the Law [the commandments of God] requires. We, too, have believed in Jesus Christ, just so as to be viewed favorably by God through our Christ-faith, and never through obeying the Law. For no one is put right in God’s view by obeying God’s Law.”

{tip content="salvation via Christ-faith"}That’s the core of Christianity{/tip}; Paul continued, until 2:21, to connect it to the crucifixion and supposed subsequent Resurrection, for the reasons we presented in our discussion of 1:1. Furthermore, when Paul said “no one is put right in God’s view by obeying God’s Law,” this was clearly supersessionist; he clearly was asserting that Christianity replaces Judaism, and isn’t merely another pathway to salvation, but now the only pathway to salvation.

How do we know that this assertion was the start of Christianity? One cannot know when Christianity started unless one has first defined “Christianity,” such as has been done here (as salvation via Christ-faith). Furthermore, inasmuch as the start of Christianity is necessarily the event in which some members of the Jesus sect of Jews broke away from Judaism to create “Christianity,” one must also have first defined “Judaism,” as has also been done here (as salvation via obeying God’s commandments). For, if “Judaism” hasn’t been defined, then there’s no way, there’s no criterion, to determine precisely when “Christianity” broke off from “Judaism,” as something that’s not Jewish. We have, indeed, defined Christianity here, as the belief that a person gets to heaven by possessing Christ-faith (what Paul asserted in Galatians 2:16); furthermore, we have defined Judaism as the belief that one gets to heaven by following God’s laws. Clearly, these are two different faiths; by definition, they’re entirely different. Paul, in 2:1-10, has described the precise events that led up to the exact occasion at which he first asserted Christianity, to his former teacher, Peter, and to other “agents from James.” 2:11-15 has described this occasion; and even Barnabas and some of the others in attendance, were shocked at hearing this, and disagreed with this religion, which Paul was then introducing. Paul said “the circumcision party, even including Barnabas, joined in Peter’s cowardice” of supporting this demand from the “agents from James.” And 2:16-21 describes precisely what Paul asserted there, which they were rejecting: Christianity. (Moreover, as was pointed out, Paul – as in 1 Corinthians 7:19, “Whether or not a man is circumcised is unimportant; what’s important is to obey God’s commandments” – had previously shared their view. Until now, circumcision had been the exception, but Paul now created the rule from it, and he thereby created Christianity: 2:16.)

2:21, and the other lines concerning the cruciality of the Resurrection to the personal salvation of Christians, constitute an integral part of Paul’s new religion. Without the Resurrection, Christianity is nothing. Thus, too, in 1 Corinthians 15:14, Paul states flatly, “If the Resurrection did not occur, then we have nothing to preach, and you have nothing to believe.” Paul founded his new faith not upon the living Jesus, but only upon the Resurrected Christ – that is, upon the Being whom Paul claimed to have met, and not upon the person Paul’s opponents had served and whom they continued to serve after Rome’s regime had killed him. The Christian Christ was concocted by a total stranger, two decades after the Jewish Jesus was crucified. The reason Paul had opened Galatians with 1:1, indicating that he had received his authority from the after-death Christ, has already been discussed; and here, this is culminated.

So, Galatians 2:16-21 is a complete statement of Christianity. It starts with 2:16, which is the core, Christianity itself, the belief in salvation via Christ-faith; and it ends with 2:21, which is an argument for the cruciality of Jesus’s death to Christ-faith.

In no way is this new faith consistent with Judaism; and, in 2:16, this new faith actually constitutes a nullification of Judaism when Paul states that salvation comes “never by doing what the Law requires. For no one is put right in God’s view by obeying God’s Law.” That unequivocally asserts God’s replacement of Judaism by Christianity.

So, we now know how it happened that though Jesus died as a Jew in about the year 30, he became verbally resurrected by Paul as a Christian in about the year 50. One cannot understand this unless one understands the personal predicament that Paul faced.

Note that our account here doesn’t imply anything in regards to the existence or not of the Resurrection: that is, nothing is said here regarding the question of whether some ghost of Jesus actually went to one or more of his followers after Jesus was believed, by some people, to have died.⁴⁵ However, more basic than that question is the question of whether or not any ghost-story is ever true, an issue that can be safely addressed in the negative, because even the very possibility of such a phenomenon is, to put it generously, improbable. Standard religious theories about the supposed continuation of someone’s consciousness, or of “a person,” after the physical source of consciousness – a functioning nervous system – has terminated in that particular body which has thus transformed into a corpse (or, in other words, theories about ghosts), possess no basis in fact. They are false theories. Speculation cannot be presented here about the reality of ghosts in any case, much less about any theory to explain ghosts, much less about Jesus’s ghost in particular, since no theory about the physical cause of disembodied consciousnesses has been put forth, and since all scientific understandings of the cause of consciousness refer instead only to a functioning nervous system; none relates to a corpse as causing consciousness, even though ghosts are alleged to retain the physical appearance of the deceased (even when all that’s left of the actual corpse is bones). There is no scientific evidence for ghosts, and so there is no scientific theory to explain ghosts. Scientists simply don’t attempt to explain things that haven’t been demonstrated to exist. Consequently, no explanation of the resurrection of Jesus is presented here, and the only explanation that’s actually needed, for our purposes, is an explanation of the belief, “the Resurrection of Jesus.” That belief is now explained.

The reason why, for Christians, the belief in the Holy Ghost – the Resurrected Jesus – and not only a belief in both the Son (the holy Jesus) and in the Father (Judaism’s God), is an essential part of their faith, is that Paul, the faith’s inventor, had claimed to have met the Holy Ghost, whereas Paul never claimed to have met either the Father (God) or the Son (Jesus). He claimed to have met only the Holy Ghost. Thus, though God the Father and God the Son are both explicit in Galatians 1:1, God the Holy Ghost is implicit there, and is just as essential to Paul’s new faith as the two Trinitarian components that are explicitly mentioned there; the entire Trinity is present even at the start in 1:1. Paul needed the Resurrection, regardless of whether or not the Resurrection happened. In 1:1, Paul was implicitly assuming, and was implying to his readers, that he wouldn’t have seen the Holy Ghost if God hadn’t wished him to see it. The Holy Ghost was Paul’s claimed connection to both the Father and the Son, and that’s why the Holy Ghost is part of his Trinity. Paul had supposedly received his commission “from Christ and God the Father” via the Holy Ghost he had allegedly encountered on the Damascus road. That’s what he was referring to when he said in 1 Corinthians 9:1, “Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” Inasmuch as Paul stated in Galatians 1:1 that he hadn’t received his commission “from man or by means of man,” his claim in 1 Corinthians 9:1 was to have “seen Jesus our Lord” only after the Crucifixion. In 1 Corinthians 15:8-9, Paul added that, following the Resurrection-appearances to all the apostles, “Finally He [Christ] appeared to me also, … the least of the apostles.”⁴⁶ Whereas Paul asserts that the other apostles knew both the Son and the Holy Ghost, Paul asserts that he himself had met only the Holy Ghost, the Risen Christ. This is also why, in Galatians 1:12, Paul said “It was [only] Jesus Christ who revealed it [the gospel] to me.” This referred not to the living Jesus, but to the Holy Ghost, otherwise referred to as the Resurrected Jesus, or as Jesus Christ. It’s more than just a “Spirit” (such as later in Galatians 4:6), because it appeared physically to Paul; this was a “spirit” that was a ghost. Implicit within Paul’s view is that Jesus became the Christ only upon the Crucifixion, which crowned Him as the King, the Messiah. (To Jews, this concept of a mashiach would have seemed nonsensical, since the mashiach was to be demonstrated by his defeating the military occupier of Israel and restoring Israel’s independence – not by his being defeated and killed by Israel’s occupier.) Prior to that, Jesus had been only the Messiah-in-waiting; and Jews now (after his crucifixion) could view Jesus only as having been no Messiah at all. That left as the prime prospects for conversion to Christ only Gentiles – Paul’s specialty. By asserting this implicit structure, Paul was cementing his authority as being higher than that of the authentic apostles, who had known the living Jesus. Paul thus, yet again, was implying that his authority came from a purer source than theirs. And so, 2:21 climaxes the argument that 1:1 had begun.

The transmission of the Ten Commandments by God to Moses is purely a religious belief; and so, likewise, is the Resurrection of Jesus a purely religious belief. Such beliefs can be taken only on faith. They are not scientific.⁴⁷ But, in the latter case – that is, concerning the Resurrection – at least the circumstances which led to that particular belief are now clear.

Each of the four canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), at the Gospel’s respective end, alleges that Jesus’s tomb was empty after the Resurrection, but Paul doesn’t say this, and Paul’s accounts, which were written earlier and without such embellishments, were more along the lines of the standard model of a ghost story, with no concern about what happened to the deceased’s corpse. Paul said nothing about Jesus’s corpse. Paul even asserts in passages such as Galatians 3:5 that the “Spirit” inspires Christians, and that “God gives you the Spirit … because you hear the gospel and believe it.” Paul’s “Spirit” is there reduced to being a mere inspiration; it doesn’t even require a ghost. Paul alleges that God gave to Christians Jesus’s inspiration, but that this inspiration comes only to people who possess Christ-faith.

Furthermore, as has been previously noted, 2 Corinthians 12:1-7, a passage which asserts itself to have been written three years before the event that Paul describes in Galatians 2:11-21, and whose writing therefore predated by three years Paul’s invention of Christianity, presents Paul admitting that his having seen Jesus’s ghost might have been merely a delusion or an illusion. Only after Paul invented Christianity did Paul need to claim that it wasn’t merely imaginary. He now needed this ghost not in order to convince his readers that Jesus’s ghost appeared, but in order to convince his readers that Paul possessed some kind of miraculous authorization. Paul needed this ghost originally in order for Paul to impress people regarding Jesus; that’s all. Paul in that pre-year-49 period was selling Jesus’s sect, and he was doing this by selling Jesus. But by the time of the event which Paul describes in Galatians 2:11-21, Paul needed to assert that Jesus’s ghost really did exist on the Damascus road, and that it authorized Paul; this allegation, of his seeing an actual Resurrection, now became part of his “gospel of Christ,” for the reasons we delineated when discussing 1:1. Previously, it hadn’t been, as 2 Corinthians 12:1-7 demonstrates. (That pre-Christian account of Paul’s encounter with Jesus’s ghost served a very different and more modest function.⁴⁸) The Trinity was developed subsequently, as a happenstance of Paul’s predicament in the event he describes in 2:11-21. And so, clearly, nothing of Christian doctrine predated the event that Paul describes in 2:11-21, an event occurring in the year 49 or 50. Prior to that, Paul was a Jew. And after that, he was a Christian – the first Christian.

In 2 Corinthians 12:1, Paul clearly said that he was writing about “visions and revelations I have had from the Lord.” But then promptly in 12:2, without explanation, he switched to third-person: these apparitions had appeared instead to someone else. And furthermore, Paul now said he didn’t know whether this actually happened, and he didn’t even make clear precisely what he was referring to – all of the “vision,” or only part of it, and (if the latter) which part (e.g., “the third heaven”). Moreover, he now was speaking not of “visions and revelations from the Lord,” but of being “elevated to the third heaven,” a phrase which literalist Christians could take to mean possibly something different from “visions and revelations … from the Lord.” Furthermore, he now was writing about experiences “inside the body” versus experiences “outside the body,” and a literalist reader might again not equate that contrast with the contrast between “visions and revelations” versus reality. He couldn’t possibly have written this passage more ambiguously – and this is the earliest description that survives concerning the Resurrection; so, it’s key. If Paul happened to be a skilled liar, then such vagueness from him would have been understandable as a means to avoid being asked questions which could expose his entire account there as a lie. (Perhaps when Paul wrote this passage, in the year 46 or 47, any allegation that the ghost of Jesus appeared after his death would have been too baldfaced a lie to assert clearly and unambiguously without one’s being considered crazy.) However, what’s clear from 2 Corinthians 12:1-7 is that 14 years after those “visions,” Paul wasn’t asserting to be a certainty his “visions” on that occasion, as having been anything more than that. Simple logic makes clear that Paul indeed was writing here about the same person, namely himself: Right after his miraculous references in the third person, he switches immediately back again, in 12:5, to the first person; and, by the time he gets to 12:7, he’s even boasting about “the many wonderful things I saw,” while he simultaneously denies that he is boasting about anything. That is clearly first person: Paul was writing, throughout 2 Corinthians 12:1-7, about himself. The mark of the dissembler is all over this passage. The contrast between this account and Paul’s subsequent categorical references to his “visions” is also striking.⁴⁹

Among Paul’s subsequent accounts of his having seen the Resurrection, the most detailed is 1 Corinthians 15:4-8, which says that three days after the Crucifixion, the Holy Ghost appeared repeatedly to Peter and James, and perhaps repeatedly to all of the disciples; and that He also “appeared to more than five hundred believers at one time, most of whom are still alive.” Whereas in our era, crowd counts are debated even when an event is captured on film, Paul’s 500+ estimate was totally unconfirmable in his era, but it conveyed a tone of gravitas to his account. Paul also fudged the chronology so as to give the impression that Paul experienced the Resurrection shortly after the disciples and the “more than five hundred” did; but all evidence suggests that for about three years after the crucifixion, Paul was hounding and perhaps even helping to kill Jesus’s followers until Paul allegedly saw this ghost on the Damascus road. When Paul wrote about Christ’s having appeared simultaneously to 500+ followers, Paul had not been among those followers, even if that happened; he was not writing this as eyewitness testimony, regardless whether it was true. No eyewitness account, no first-hand description, of the Resurrection exists, except Paul’s account of his own alleged Damascus road encounter – an account that solidified only after the year 49, approximately 16 years following the alleged event, and which still remained quite vague. That vagueness is especially remarkable because of Paul’s assertion, just a few lines later, in 15:14, that, “If Christ has not been raised from the dead, then we have nothing to preach, and you have nothing to believe.” Paul said the Resurrection was the most important thing ever – but it wasn’t important enough for him to mention except vaguely, in passing.

To create the Holy Ghost, Paul readily accessed, from Jewish belief, the concept that God’s will, or God’s spirit, or the Holy Spirit, occasionally intervened in human affairs; and Paul’s Gentile audience didn’t even notice that Paul’s alleged third element of his Trinity – the worship of a ghost – was actually adding, to this Jewish belief, still another Christian violation of the first three of the Ten Commandments: a violation on top of worshipping Jesus.

Other than in Paul’s writings, the earliest-written account of the Resurrection would have to be in one of the Gospels, but not in the first-written Gospel, Mark. The earliest two of all currently surviving manuscripts of Mark – the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiaticus, both of which were written during the Fourth Century – did not include Mark’s reference to the Resurrection (Mark 16:9-20), which constitute the final eleven lines of the Mark that’s in today’s bibles. Someone after approximately the year 350 added those lines to Mark, presumably in order to bring Mark into line with Matthew, Luke, and John. Consequently, other than Paul’s references to the Resurrection, the earliest-written reference to the Resurrection would have to have been one from among those three Gospels. The earliest-written of the Gospels, Mark, did not mention any appearance of Jesus’s ghost, to anyone.

The author of Luke was even smart enough to write that the resurrected “Jesus” denied that he was a ghost. Luke 24:39 presents “Jesus” saying to His disciples, “Look at my hands and feet, and see it is I myself; feel me and know, because a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.” However, if an apparition in a person’s hallucination asserts “Look at me; I’m solid flesh,” this doesn’t necessarily indicate that the apparition is real. A fantasy is a fantasy, no matter how “real” it seems to the person who is fantasizing it. Though one’s perceptions can often be equated to reality, sometimes the two are not actually one: appearances can be deceiving. When the author of Luke wrote “Jesus” as saying He wasn’t a ghost, that writer might have been retelling the delusion of someone who thought that he had heard this, or else that writer might have been knowingly passing a fraud; but, either way, there’s no credibility to it.

Paul himself, at the very end of Galatians 2:11-21, admitted in 2:21 that “Jesus died.” The only question was whether he “died for nothing.” Any later implication, by Luke or anyone else, that Jesus didn’t die, was false.

Like other aspects of Pauline or “Christian” theology, the Holy Ghost was, in later Church writings, built into a magical being who had always existed and who interceded in Jesus’s life. Christians writing after Paul imagined anything they wished about this “Spirit,” so long as it remained consistent with the entity Paul had constructed so as to authorize Paul’s apostleship of Jesus.

It’s worth emphasizing here that, when Paul said, in 1 Corinthians 15:14, “If Christ has not been raised from the dead, then we have nothing to preach, and you have nothing to believe,” the reason this was true, for him personally, was that if Jesus had not been resurrected to Paul, then Paul would have possessed no authority whatsoever amongst his own followers. As Paul said in Galatians 1:1, and elsewhere, he had been authorized only by the Holy Ghost. If Paul had not seen, and been instructed by, the Holy Ghost, then Paul wouldn’t have been authorized by anyone at all. For him to have admitted that maybe Jesus had not been resurrected, would have been for him to admit that the only people who were authorized to speak for Jesus were Jesus’s disciples – now Paul’s enemies – who had been Jesus’s followers when Jesus was alive. Paul would have simply had to quit.

Paul struggled hard to win his “converts” over to his view. They seem to have challenged him on it, because his letters battle such push-back. Paul had to fight especially hard to persuade his “converts” that the Trinity was acceptable from a Jewish standpoint. For example, 1 Corinthians 8:4-7 subtly uses his followers’ own prior polytheism as an argumentative knife to cleave Judaism’s very monotheism in two, when he rejects there “the many gods and lords that people believe in [which his followers had already abandoned, so he was using this reference as a mere doctrinal bogeyman to build his audience’s sympathy], because there is, for us, only one God, the Father, who created all things, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, who is the means through which we experience all things.” Paul here pretends to reiterate Judaism, by his repudiating his followers’ original polytheism, while what he is actually doing is to take up the common practice in the Torah of referring to the Creator both as the one-and-only “God” in some places, and as the one-and-only “Lord” in other places, and to transform that Jewish practice, of two synonyms for the same object, into two separate objects in his new Christian religion, which are as different from one another as are a father and a son – definitely not the same person. Only an extremely careful reader (or listener) would have recognized Paul’s deceptive tactic here, of changing a pair of synonyms (“God” and “Lord”) into separate and distinct objects, as distinct from each other as are a father and his son. Whereas in Judaism, “God” and “Lord” refer to the same thing; “father” and “son” aren’t synonyms; and, in fact, they are defined by their relationship to each other, so that they can never even possibly be the same person. For example, although “physician” and “artist” sometimes refer to one and the same person, “father” and “son” always refer to two different people. By contrast, for example, the phrase “God the Lord” appears together ten times in Genesis 2, not to mention the numerous other instances in which the Torah uses those synonyms in immediate succession. Genesis 2 uses the term “Lord” once without “God,” and Genesis 1 uses the term “God” 32 times, and doesn’t use the term “Lord” even a single time. Judaism couldn’t possibly be clearer that “God” and “Lord” are synonyms. For Paul to use those two terms here, to refer respectively to the “Father,” and then to something that’s definitely not “the Father” (the “Son”), was pure deceit from him. Moreover, God isn’t actually referred to even once in the Torah as being “the Father.” Only twice is God the Father referred to in the later parts of the Old Testament, in Psalms 89:26 and Isaiah 64:8. Paul picked up simply from that skimpy base, to make Jesus into God’s Son, but he did this in a sense which was alien even to Psalms and Isaiah, where God was portrayed as being every person’s Father, not just as Jesus’s (since the Jewish God, unlike pagan gods such as Zeus and Jupiter, has no relatives at all, and thus no distinctive “Son”). And, of course, Psalms and Isaiah didn’t even constitute Scripture for Jews, since they’re not in the Torah. So, Paul’s distortions and misrepresentations of Jewish Scripture occurred on numerous levels. (And Paul also deceived routinely about his Trinity. For example, in Galatians, 1:1 says “God the Father ... raised Jesus Christ from the dead”; 1:4 says Jesus “sacrificed himself ... according to the will of God the Father”; and 1:16 says that God “revealed his Son to me.” So, this “Father” and “Son” are two beings, not one, and worshipping both of them is therefore polytheistic if the term “polytheistic” has meaning at all.) This piling of deceit upon deceit is how Paul split the Jewish God in two (and then, from there, in three, so as to reach the Holy Ghost, which he claimed to have met, and whose existence he was actually striving to establish by all of these gyrations). In other words: Paul knowingly and with great care confused and misled his readers, in order to be able to win his arguments. He even admitted, in 1 Corinthians 9:20-27, that he would do whatever was necessary in order to win. He virtually admitted there, to his “converts,” that they were his tools, who believed him at peril of becoming his dupes. He said that he was doing this to them in order to save them, but (like everything else in his statements) he had to contradict both the Torah and even himself, in order to present his arguments, since he was actually lying. The only basis for believing him was faith; and he kept violating that faith, whenever he contradicted himself, and also whenever he cited the Torah while contradicting the Torah.

In short: Paul deceived repeatedly, so as to argue for his Resurrection-based Trinity.⁵⁰

Interestingly, many translations of Galatians don’t place between quotation marks the entirety of the passage in which Paul set forth his gospel of Christ, from that statement’s start in the middle of 2:14, extending straight through to its end 2:21. (There are NO quotation marks in the original, because ancient Greek didn’t have quotation marks.) Perhaps these translators wanted not to make EXPLICIT that, until the event he’s recounting here, Paul had actually NEVER PREVIOUSLY ASSERTED what subsequently emerged to become his “gospel of Christ” – namely, the SUPERSESSION of the Jewish covenant by faith-and-grace – and that he DID assert it, and that he asserted all of it, up through 2:21, on this cardinally important occasion, right after the council in Jerusalem. (Prominent EXCEPTIONS, biblical translations that got this RIGHT, and that placed all of Paul’s gospel of Christ in quotation marks, include the New King James Version, the New International Version, and the Contemporary English Version.) But there’s actually every reason to believe that, prior to the event recounted in 2:11-16, Paul had been accepting obedient Jews as saved without question, and had been converting all of his Gentile “converts” to a Jewish-Law-abiding system that added faith-and-grace for violations by Gentiles, as the means by which Gentiles could win the very SAME salvation that any obedient Jew does. (That’s the system Paul had been teaching in 1 Corinthians 7:19-20 and throughout his missionary work until the event he recounts in Galatians 2:11-22. But, as we’ve also previously mentioned, 1 Thessalonians 4:1-17 exhibits a transitional two-gospels approach, because it was written so soon after this event. And after this event and the brief transitional period following it, Paul was the Christian recognized by “historians.”)

There is, in other words, every reason to believe that these “converts” by Paul considered themselves to have belonged, AS Jesus-followers, to a Jesus-following SECT OF JUDAISM. The only Jewish law which Paul and the leaders in Jerusalem considered to be so dangerous to impose so that faith-and-grace, really God’s mercy, would be the only hope for Gentiles’ salvation, was Genesis 17:14 – the circumcision law, Judaism’s signature-law. And it’s understandable, therefore, that this is where the split ultimately emerged.

We possess good reason to infer that the statement of Paul to Peter that starts in 2:14 actually ends at the very end of the second chapter – at the end, that is to say, of 2:21 – because Paul’s argument to Peter flows SMOOTHLY all the way through to the chapter’s end, and it’s furthermore all of a single piece, culminating in the centrality of the crucifixion, without which the earlier parts of this statement would have made no sense at all. After this event; that is, after the event recounted in 2:11-21; Paul was – as here now in Galatians – trying to wean his followers GRADUALLY AWAY from that Jewish sect, into his own, entirely new, faith, which he called simply “the gospel of the Messiah,” or “the gospel of Christ.” As was previously noted, this phrase sounded, to people in Paul’s time, like the belief of a JEWISH SECT. Only in subsequent decades did Paul’s new gospel start to be called “Christianity,” by Paul’s followers in Antioch. This was at sufficiently LATE a period so that the split away from Judaism had now become OVERT. Paul wanted to retain his association with the Jerusalem organization for as long as he possibly could, so as to continue borrowing from their pre-established credibility for as long as possible. But, ultimately, that became no longer practicable. By that time, perhaps there were more members in Paul’s organization than there were in James’s.

How do we know that, PRIOR to this event, Paul had never asserted that Judaism was superseded; had never said (2:16) “For no one is put right in God’s view by obeying God’s Law,” and also that he DID say it ON that occasion? How do we know that Christianity was originally conceived on this occasion, and thus that this event was the most important event in all of human history – the event that created Western Civilization? If Paul had not actually stated this on that occasion, he wouldn’t then have had any rationalization whatsoever for his side of this crucial argument against Peter and the other agents from James. Paul never expressed any OTHER argument for this position (the core of which is 2:16).⁵¹ And if Paul had stated this argument PRIOR to that occasion, then his split away from the Jerusalem community, and the riots against him by not just Jesus-sect Jews, but by all Jews, that were portrayed in Acts 21:21 forward, would have started occurring earlier, even PRIOR to the council in Jerusalem – but there’s no reason to believe that to have happened. 2:16 asserts that the Jewish covenant has been terminated by God; that Judaism is DEFUNCT. For Paul to have asserted this, was for him to negate the Jewish religion, to say to Jews that God no longer viewed favorably people who adhere to the Jewish faith and who do not believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Jewish mashiach. Paul was here implying (and he made explicit in Romans 3:20&23) that God had concluded that circumcision and other obedience to the covenant were too high a price for people to have to pay for an admission-ticket into heaven, a price that too few people (Paul even said that “no one”) were willing or able to pay, and that this God had therefore now placed heaven on sale, to be purchased instead by mere faith in Jesus’s being the mashiach. Paul was saying that therefore circumcision and all the rest of the price Jews had already paid for heaven were henceforth a total waste, or “sheer trash” according to Philippians 3:2-9. Jews had overpaid; they wouldn’t get any refund on their overpayment; and, from now on, Gentiles were successfully going to buy heaven for far less, they’d get a much better deal and become God’s new “Chosen People” (Philippians 1:1, 1 Corinthians 1:2, 2 Corinthians 1:1). All of this was already implied in Galatians 2:16. Thus, those were fighting words not only to Jesus-sect Jews, but to non-Jesus-sect Jews. These were fighting words to all Jews; and this is why, if Paul had said such a thing PRIOR to this event, then the Jewish riots against him (recounted in Acts 21:21 forward) would have started prior to this event; and no evidence even suggests this to have been the case.

If what Paul said on that occasion included everything from 2:14 through 2:21, then the “agents from James” were communicating from James that he rejected 2:16-21 as representing what Jesus had stood for. Paul was calling Peter hypocritical for changing his mind and joining in with James there. In other words, Paul was necessarily implying in lines 2:16-21, but was not explicitly asserting there, that Paul had, on that occasion, in the year 49 or 50, shocked everyone present, by having asserted a doctrine (namely 2:16-21) which contradicted what Jesus had stood for. Obviously, if Paul were to have explicitly admitted in these lines that Jesus would have opposed the doctrine 2:16-21, then Paul would promptly have lost all his followers, and his career as an “apostle” of Jesus would have ended as a direct result of this admission by him. This is why he didn’t explicitly say that 2:16-21 was anti-Jesus and that James and Peter therefore rejected it. But his implicitly asserting this makes even more certain that it’s so, and that Paul had, indeed, first announced Christianity (2:16-21) on that very occasion. This is the reason scholars devote little ink to the subject of whether Paul’s statement on that occasion was only 2:14, or was instead all of 2:14-21: this matter is too important, too central to a scientific understanding of the creation of Christianity; too threatening to a scholarly interpretation of Christianity’s start. So, scholars drip buckets of ink onto other, far less important, “issues,” while virtually ignoring this smoking gun and the fingerprints that cover it. Even the scholars who assert that Paul’s entire statement in 2:14-21 was made on that occasion, ignore the massive implications of this assumption – an assumption that a scientific analysis of Galatians finds to be established with no authentic reason to doubt.

Although Paul in this passage refers to Jesus (as “Christ”), he does not quote Jesus as having said anything that authorizes what Paul is saying here: the replacement of salvation-via-obedience-to-God’s-commandments (Judaism), by salvation-via-Christ-faith (Christianity). If Jesus had said any such thing, then it would have been the most prominent of all of the statements attributed to him, and Paul would certainly have been intelligent enough in Galatians to have cited it here, but Paul didn’t cite Jesus at all. The radical innovation Paul was introducing was thus new to everyone present at the time – and had especially never been asserted by Jesus.

Scholars wish to avoid the negative implications for the legitimacy of Christianity that arise from acknowledging that Paul on that occasion said to Peter not only 2:14 but the entirety of 2:14-2:21. So, they place in quotes only Paul’s remark in 2:14; they are implicitly assuming that Paul, in Galatians, failed to state what his response was to Peter, other than to label Peter (his own teacher) a hypocrite. How likely is it that, in Paul’s response on this occasion, Paul failed to present an argument against Peter and the other agents from James? Such a failure, on such an occasion, would have been entirely out of character for Paul.

Furthermore, 2:15 – the first of the lines that those scholars are alleging to pick up after Paul’s account of the incident in Antioch – is clearly a part of the incident in Antioch, because 2:15 addresses Peter, saying “we” are “Jews by birth”; and the Galatian readers of Paul’s letter were not that, but Peter clearly was. So, without a doubt, the statement that Paul had made to Peter on that occasion was 2:14-2:21, not just 2:14.

A random sampling of 17 popular translations of the Bible shows most of them to be incompetent in this regard. 10 translations were grossly incompetent, in that they ended this quotation at 2:14: English Standard Version, New Century Version, New Catholic Edition, New American Bible for Catholics, Jerusalem Bible, New English Bible, Revised English Bible, Revised Standard Version, New Revised Standard Version, Today’s English Version. 2 translations ended it at 2:17: Living Bible, New Living Bible. 1 translation fudged this question entirely: King James Version. 1 translation fudged whether the quotation ended perhaps at 2:15: Amplified New Testament. Only 3 translations (as previously listed) ended this quotation correctly, at 2:21: New King James Version, Contemporary English Version, and New International Version. So: only 3 out of 17 translations were competent. 10 of these 17 translations were grossly incompetent, clearly ending at 2:14, despite the general recognition – even by scholars – that only few-to-none of Paul’s members in Galatia had been born as Jews (and so, that 2:15 was logically necessarily a part of the quotation that starts with 2:14). Evidently, then, one crucial reason why scholars have not understood that 2:11-21 represented the event that actually started Christianity is that even the most elementary logical ability is simply absent in the majority of scholars. Moreover, if a person’s logical ability is weak, then it’s very easy for that person to believe whatever he or she wants, which isn’t likely to be that Christianity is a hoax. Scholars will therefore probably continue to resist this conclusion, quite regardless of the evidence.

Clearly, from Galatians 3:1 onwards, Paul is addressing his Galatian readers directly, no longer recounting what had happened at and immediately after the council in Jerusalem. Thus, he opens 3:1 by addressing the Galatians personally. By contrast, 2:14-21 presents Paul’s account of what his response had been when Peter and James’s other men challenged him over Genesis 17:14. This quotation definitely ended at 2:21.

What else can be said, at this point, about what’s not explicit in 2:11-21, but about what’s IMPLICIT in it?

To begin with, high significance attaches to Paul’s having considered to be acceptable, to his Galatian readers, that he declare openly to them that he had stood opposed to, and had outright condemned in 2:13 as “cowardly,” Peter. If Peter had been selected by Jesus as the sect’s head, as Paul’s later followers who wrote Matthew 16:18 and John 21:15-17 said, then Paul wouldn’t have been able to get away with this; it would have been seen as blatantly insubordinate in the eyes of all members of the sect. In other words, what’s striking is that, even though Paul was evidently prohibited from overtly standing opposed to James on this occasion, he had no such compunctions about publicly opposing Peter. Furthermore, as was previously noted, Paul would have had no reason to have even been mentioning to the Galatians the incident in 2:11-16 if he didn’t have some reason to believe that they might possibly have heard about it already from his enemies. Clearly, Paul was here giving his side of a dispute that he had engaged in with his enemies, who are here clearly identified as (2:12) “agents from James.” Peter had joined them by backing away from the table; but Paul didn’t attack the agents from James – he attacked only Peter. Yet, Paul wasn’t here DEFENDING himself against any charge of his having BEEN insubordinate then to Peter – this demonstrates that Peter was likewise subordinate to James. Obviously, Paul’s enemies HAD NOT BEEN CHARGING PAUL AS HAVING BEEN insubordinate in treating Peter in this brazenly insulting manner. Clearly, that wasn’t part of the charge Paul was now defending himself against. Equally obviously, Peter was Paul’s predecessor and his senior in the sect; Paul has himself acknowledged this; but when Paul in 2:11 said “I opposed Peter in public,” and in 2:13 called Peter an outright “coward,” and proceeded to report how Paul had on this occasion been so arrogant as to have instructed Peter on the teachings of Jesus – a man whom Peter had known intimately and Paul had never even met – this could only have been seen within the sect as having been the rankest insubordination, IF Peter had, himself, actually BEEN the sect’s leader. Yet, the charge of insubordination isn’t what Paul was defending himself against here. Clearly, then, Peter wasn’t the sect’s leader, notwithstanding such later-written passages, from Paul’s followers, as Matthew 16:18.

Moreover, the fact that the precipitator of this confrontation was the “agents from James” says everything, but only by implication (because Paul was struggling to avoid admitting to his readers even that the leaders were “leaders”). If they hadn’t come, there wouldn’t have been the event, that created Christianity, recounted in 2:11-21, because the spark which ignited this conflagration would have been absent.

Furthermore, Paul starts 2:14: “But when I saw that they did not walk uprightly about the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter in the presence of all, ... .” In other words: Though Paul starts 2:14 by acknowledging that his argument is not only against Peter but also against the newly arrived “agents from James,” Paul’s attack and criticisms are directed solely against Peter. This differential treatment by Paul is absolutely stunning: Paul’s text leaves a reader no logical way to doubt that Paul was deferring to James by excluding from Paul’s attacks the men James had sent to check up on Peter’s carrying out of his assignment from James.

Consequently, Galatians 2:11-16 provides direct and irrefutable evidence both that Peter WAS NOT the leader and that James was, which Acts 15:13-21 implicitly powerfully expands by its reporting that James made the final decisions within the sect.⁵² This is why we can infer with confidence that Peter’s role in Galatians 2:11 was AS AN AGENT FROM JAMES, who had arrived earlier than did the anonymous ones that Paul mentioned in the next line, 2:12. Galatians 2:11-16 makes crystal clear that on this occasion Paul had stood opposed to both Peter and the “agents from James”; and we can also tell, by logical inference from this passage, that Peter was, himself, on this occasion, ALSO an agent from James; albeit, an agent who (understandably) was loath to carry out this assignment, and who had arrived earlier.

Again, Paul has stated his most important facts IMPLICITLY, rather than explicitly. And, yet again, therefore, a scholarly reading of Paul’s text, which – being scholarly – reads ONLY its explicit level, misses what’s MOST important in it.

Thus, too, Galatians 2:11-14 proves that Matthew 16:18, and the other Gospel passages which explicitly place into Jesus’s mouth the designation of Peter to run the group, are lies: not history, but calculated myth. Peter wouldn’t have instantaneously buckled to James’s emissaries, and wouldn’t have been publicly humiliated by Paul, such as both happened here, if those later-written Gospel accounts about “Jesus” were true. Galatians, thus – the best evidence of all – under legal/forensic examination, exposes bare the Roman Catholic Church (supposedly begun by Matthew 16:18) as a fraud, and consequently all of Christianity as nothing but a Roman Catholic hoax. (Of course, this excludes from “Christianity” the Ebionites and other Jewish Jesus-followers, who had nothing to do with writing and assembling the New Testament. By “Christianity” is meant the religion whose Scripture is the New Testament.) Paul’s Roman Catholic Church retroactively made Peter, and not James, Jesus’s successor, because Peter had been Paul’s teacher, and because the Roman Church needed someone to connect it to Jesus, and they couldn’t choose James, since he had been the enemy of Paul, who actually started the Roman Catholic Church.

There it is: Christianity is a hoax, not just as regards its beliefs, but also as regards its organizational authority. Paul implicitly confessed to both hoaxes (though he didn’t himself perpetrate the hoax about Peter’s heading the sect – his followers did).

When Paul, in 2:2, said that his entire career-success would be at stake in the upcoming conference in Jerusalem, there can be no reasonable doubt as to who called this conference or why: James called it, and he did so because the pressures upon James, as the leader, were now intense, both from the born Jews within the Jesus-sect, and from the born Jews outside it – these pressures being to get Paul’s men circumcised, in accord with Genesis 17:14. Clearly, when Paul said in 2:2, “I went to the conference because God told me to go,” he was blatantly lying, because James had ordered him to come to the conference: it was, by Paul’s own implicit admission, essential for Paul to be there in order to present his case, which would be this conference’s very focus. Moreover, inasmuch as James had, for 17 years, himself gone along with Paul’s acceptance of uncircumcised “converts,” James was almost certainly extremely reluctant to reverse this longstanding policy, and to thereby risk losing Paul’s congregations. One may thus reasonably assume that James called this conference in the fervent hope that Paul would offer there a persuasive case, which would somehow quell these pressures that impinged upon James. Consequently, the likelihood that James failed not only to tell Paul to come, but to tell Paul that the conference’s subject would be the non-circumcision of his men, and so have avoided letting Paul recognize to come well prepared to win a case that both he and Paul fervently hoped Paul would win, is so remote as to be virtually nil.⁵³ This means that the likelihood is virtually 100% that Paul was outright lying when he said in 2:2 “I went because God told me to.” Paul, here as elsewhere, did everything that he possibly could, to diminish, in the view of his readers, James’s stature as Jesus’s heir. When Paul was writing this letter, perhaps three or four years after the event, he was trying to wean his men away from James’s sect. The reason that Paul said that God had told him to come to the conference is that Paul refused to affirm explicitly to his men that James was Paul’s boss. Paul didn’t want to remind them of that. For Paul now to acknowledge James’s supreme authority would be exactly opposite to Paul’s primary goal of winning those congregations as his own, no longer James’s. Also, Paul didn’t want his Galatian readers to know how crucial this conference in Jerusalem really was; Paul especially didn’t want them to know that their own membership in the Jesus-community was at stake here. Paul’s goal was to keep these men with him, at the same time as he subtly removed them from Judaism altogether and made them his own without James’s leadership, and without Judaism of any other sect, but rather in Paul’s entirely new religion. Paul employed carefully calculated terminology, such as “ekklesia” (instead of “sunagoge”) and “the gospel of Christ” (the then-Jewish-sounding phrase “the good news of the mashiach”), in order to achieve his deceptions. These lies from Paul not only tied him up in contradictions, but they exhibited – they displayed, they proved by logically necessary implication – that James indeed was Jesus’s heir. This testimony demonstrating that James was the group’s leader is of even greater reliability because Paul did everything that he could to hide the fact, and to challenge it, on the explicit level (such as in 2:6). This is like a witness in court admitting something under cross-examination from the opposed attorney, acknowledging facts this witness had previously denied and had done everything possible to hide.

Further high quality confirmation of the hypothesis that’s demonstrated in 2:11-14, of James having been the successor to Jesus rather than Peter having been, is provided by the testimony of Josephus. He wrote perhaps at about the same time as did Luke, the writer of Acts, whose testimony for confirmation we’ve previously mentioned. Josephus possesses even higher authority than does Luke and Luke’s Acts: Josephus’s testimony, unlike that of Acts, is entirely INDEPENDENT of Paul; he was no follower of Paul, and so his testimony cannot reasonably be suspected of having been accommodated to, and so contaminated by, Paul’s still-earlier testimony. Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews, in its passage 20:9:1 (also sometimes cited by its line-numbers as 20:197-203), presents a fascinating, and evidentiarily extremely important, account of the murder of James, occurring in the year 62 CE, by a Jewish High Priest, Ananus. Josephus published this in approximately the year 94, and so it was a contemporary account. This Priest’s action, according to Josephus, elicited such outrage from Jerusalem’s Jews, that the then-reigning King, Herod Agrippa, was thereby induced to replace Ananus. Thus, James’s personal renown, and his high regard amongst the Jewish public, receive Josephus’s direct, explicit, and independent, confirmation, supporting the logical inferences that have been drawn here previously from the top evidentiary source, Paul, supplemented by an evidentiary source below both Paul and Josephus – Luke. Furthermore, Josephus wrote entirely as an uninvolved stranger to these people and events; he, unlike both Paul and Luke, had no personal involvement in these matters, and can, therefore, be presumed to have at least tried to present them as they, in fact, were.

This Josephan passage, also like Paul’s testimony, refers to James as having been Jesus’s brother. It furthermore independently confirms that Jesus “was called the Christ” (Josephus using here, like Paul, the Greek language and Messiah-term). Also very importantly (and importantly unlike Christian sources), this passage asserts that the Jewish public typically held the High Priest in low esteem, which confirms the people’s opposition to the “religious leader” who was imposed upon them by Roman authority.

Thus, Josephus’s account confirms important things about BOTH James and Jesus.

Another very important thing it confirms about both of them concerns the respective ways in which Jewish and Roman laws dealt with the death penalty: James here was being put to death by a Jewish court (which was headed by a High Priest appointed by the Romans, but which was nonetheless executing Jewish and not Roman laws), and this court therefore applied the Jewish death penalty, which was by stoning, and not the Roman one, by crucifixion. This passage in Josephus provides, therefore, yet additional confirmation to the absurdity of the subsequently written Gospel accounts of Jesus’s trial, in which Jesus was supposedly executed for his having violated Jewish, not Roman, laws, and yet was, incontestably, crucified (the Roman punishment for sedition), and NOT stoned to death (the Jewish punishment for blasphemy, specified in Leviticus 24:14-16).

Furthermore, unlike the infamous later anonymous Christian insertion into Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews (the passage often referred to as Josephus’s TESTIMONIUM FLAVIANUM, which is Antiquities 18:3:3), the present Josephan passage (Antiquities 20:9:1) provides UNTAMPERED-WITH, authentic, independent, contemporary non-Christian mention of the historical Jesus. It’s a far lengthier passage than the very brief TESTIMONIUM FLAVIANUM, and it provides a narrative that recounts many events, all in a credible cause-effect sequence. In stark contrast, the TF offers nothing more than a brief piece of rank (if not blatant) Christian evangelism that calls Jesus “a wise man, if it be proper to call him a man, because he performed miracles,” and that claims Jesus “was resurrected on the third day after his crucifixion.” The TF even goes so far as to assert that Jesus “was the Christ.” Anyone who believed that Jesus was the Christ was, by definition, a Christian; and clearly the TF was written by a Christian. By contrast, the passage that we are here discussing calls Jesus nothing more than “the so-called Christ.” In fact, since this passage contradicts in so many ways the Christian accounts, it’s even ANTI-Christian; it clearly was not in any sense Christian propaganda, such as the New Testament is (and such as the TF is). It therefore constitutes one of the best evidences (besides Paul’s letters) to refute the Jesus-never-existed scholars, such as Earl Doherty, Acharya S, Timothy Freke, George A. Wells, Robert M. Price, and others.⁵⁴ Consequently, this passage’s historiographical importance is enormous with respect not only to James, but also to Jesus.

The entirety of this important passage will therefore be presented here.

In the way of an initial explanation of it (more extensive than the brief summary just given of it was): Josephus refers to the Emperor, or “Caesar,” who is Nero, appointing Albinus to succeed the late-deceased Festus as the procurator, or governor, of Judaea, in 62 CE. The Judaean King, Herod Agrippa, took this occasion to instruct that new procurator, prior even to Albinus’s arrival in Judaea, to appoint a new High Priest, Ananus, son of a retired High Priest, who had likewise been called Ananus. This Ananus Jr. was promptly appointed, and immediately exhibited the worst authoritarian traits of his elitist Sadducean sect. For reasons unstated by Josephus, this young Ananus hastily called together a “sanhedrin,” or, it seems, essentially a kangaroo-court, of Sanhedrin judges, forthwith to convict James as a breaker of Jewish law and to have him instantaneously executed. The outrage against this amongst the Jewish public was brought to King Agrippa’s attention, and the new High Priest was promptly ousted. As described by Josephus, James’s support on this occasion was LED by those Jews “who were the strictest in their observance of the laws,” which is to say, by precisely the same group of Jews whom the mythological Christ, in Mark and the other Gospels (excepting only some parts of Matthew), had CONDEMNED with special fervor. Therefore, according to this Josephan passage, Jesus’s brother and successor, James, was killed by a Roman-appointed High Priest; and James’s STRONGEST SUPPORTERS – the strongest supporters, in other words, of Jesus’s own appointed successor – were strict Jewish-Law-observant Jews, the very SAME group that the Gospel-writers claim to have been the strongest ENEMIES of Jesus; and this account therefore implicitly stands at odds against the Gospels’ portrayal of Jesus-vs.-the-Pharisees. Josephus contradicts the New Testament, but affirms both Jesus and James. Here, then, is this historically very important passage, Antiquities of the Jews 20:9:1:

“Upon hearing of Festus’s death [in 62 CE], Caesar sent Albinus to Judaea as procurator. The King removed Joseph from the High Priesthood, and bestowed the office on Ananus’s son, who was called Ananus like his father. Although the elder Ananus had been well reputed, and had had five other sons who had likewise served long and well as High Priest, even despite the low esteem in which High Priests were customarily held by the Jewish people, this new High Priest Ananus showed himself immediately to be rash and arrogant. Furthermore, he was from the sect of the Sadducees, who are renowned among the Jews for being the most severely heartless in their judgments. Ananus, sensing an opportunity, since Festus had just died and Albinus was still en-route to his new post, immediately convened the judges of the Sanhedrin, to render judgment upon a man named James, and upon some of his companions. This James happened to be the brother of Jesus, the so-called Christ. Ananus accused these people of having broken the law, and then he delivered them up to be stoned to death. However, Jerusalem’s inhabitants who were reputed to be the most fair-minded and the strictest in their observance of the law, were outraged at what had been done. These people secretly sent representatives to the King, urging that what Ananus had done was in blatant violation of the law, and that Ananus should therefore be prohibited from ever again doing so terrible a thing. Some even went to meet with Albinus, still en-route from Alexandria, and informed him that Ananus had broken [even Roman] law in doing this without his previously having acquired the procurator’s explicit consent. Convinced that Ananus’s action was indeed unacceptable, Albinus wrote an angry letter to him, threatening punishment. King Agrippa then fired and replaced Ananus. The new High Priest, likewise the son of a former High Priest, Damneus, went by the name of Jesus of Damneus.”

The Australian scholar of early Christianity, Robert Crotty, in the seventh chapter of a book he’s currently (as of my writing) producing about James, makes the perceptive comment on this passage, “Josephus had [here] revised his earlier estimation of Ananus in the Jewish Wars [4:5:2], where he spoke of him as ‘most righteous, an able leader’ who, if he had been followed by the people, would have averted the destruction of Jerusalem. Perhaps it was in the interval between the Jewish Wars and writing the Antiquities of the Jews that Josephus had been informed of the unlawful execution of James. It was sufficient cause for him to change his opinion of Ananus completely and forcibly.”

There are also other documentary sources, later than Josephus, which are discussed in Robert Eisenman’s 1998 James the Brother of Jesus, and in other books about James, indicating that James was so very important a figure, that his execution was a precipitating event which led to the final round of Jewish revolts that produced, within eight years of James’s death, the Roman attack upon and destruction of Jerusalem. All of this late evidence suggests that the Jesus movement was importantly involved in the Jewish resistance to Roman authority. Consequently, it also supports the view that Jesus was, indeed, a very real political threat to the Roman occupation authorities, including to the Herodian kings, and the High Priests. That, however, still remains speculative, especially because of the lateness of these sources. The majority of scholars, respecting the New Testament’s portrayal of Jesus as a “Prince of Peace” inauthentic to the warlike sense of that phrase in the Old Testament (where the successor to King David is supposed to become the “Prince of Peace” by slaughtering the alien occupiers of Israel), continue to see the group’s founder, Jesus, as having carefully walked the fence between cooperating with and resisting these occupying authorities. This Josephan passage provides further refutation of that view held by scholars and by other religious teachers.

Providing yet further refutation of the New Testament’s portrayal is the following passage from Book XV, Chapter 44, of The Annals, written by another Roman historian, Tacitus, and published in or around the year 116, likewise concerning the reign of Nero – here specifically the fire that destroyed Rome:

“Neither the gifts which the Emperor granted to the survivors nor his offerings to the gods were able to quiet the public’s suspicions that he had ordered the conflagration. Thus, he blamed the fire upon, and his agents exquisitely tortured, a widely despised group called ‘Christians.’ Their founder, Christus, had been executed by Pontius Pilate, the procurator of Judea during Tiberius’s reign, and though that execution suppressed this group’s rebellions for awhile, their resistance subsequently resumed not only in their original location, Judea, but even in Rome, the city towards which all horrible social movements ultimately gravitate and find their center. Consequently, arrests were made first of ones who pled guilty, and those confessions identified a vast multitude of other Christians who were convicted upon that testimony, which concerned not so much Christians having set fire to the city, as their hating all mankind. Public humiliations of every type were applied to these people’s executions: first, they were covered with the skins of, and made to appear like, animals; then, some of them were ripped apart by ravenous dogs, while others were simply crucified, and still others were burnt alive to illuminate Rome through the night. Nero provided his gardens for these public entertainments, and mingled with the spectators dressed as a charioteer, standing in his chariot. Thus, even though those criminals deserved their punishments, a public feeling of compassion arose toward them, because it seemed that these convicts were being destroyed more for the Emperor’s sadistic enjoyment than for the benefit of the public.”

Without a doubt, the Emperor Nero was the very opposite of friendly toward Jesus’s authentic followers. Paul referred to Nero in Romans 13:1-5 as being God’s agent upon Earth to make and to enforce the laws as Nero saw fit, laws that one must obey “not only to avoid God’s wrath and punishment, but as a matter of principle and conscience.” Paul also said, with apparent pride, in Philippians 4:22, that some of Paul’s followers were located “in the Emperor’s palace.” Nero burnt James’s people, but Nero was being served in his palace by one or more of Paul’s people. So, whom does the Pope, called in the Church’s Latin tongue the “Pontifex Maximus,” represent? In Nero’s time, one of the Emperor’s most prominent titles was “Pontifex Maximus.” The Pope is his successor. That answers the question: The Pope is the successor not only to Nero who burned Jesus’s followers, but also to Tiberius, the Emperor whose employee, Pontius Pilate, had earlier executed Jesus for sedition, which was threatening Tiberius’s authority; the Pope is the successor to Jesus’s ultimate executioner. He’s not the successor to Peter, much less to Jesus. From the very start, Roman Catholicism – the Christian faith throughout its earliest centuries, and the largest Christian faith even today – represented Rome, not Jerusalem; the executioners of Jesus and his followers, not Jesus and his followers.

Where, one might ask, is Peter in this incident recounted by Josephus? Perhaps he was among the unnamed companions of James, who likewise were stoned to death by Ananus. But, in any case, Peter was historically too inconsequential a person to have been mentioned by name by Josephus or by anyone else than Paul and Paul’s followers. Peter wasn’t even mentioned anywhere in all of Josephus’s voluminous writings, wherein can be found specific references to Jesus, James, Caiaphas, Pontius Pilate, numerous Herodian kings, as well as to other figures who were cited in the New Testament accounts. We know Peter’s name today only because Paul’s followers wrote not just the New Testament, but all other Christian works, such as the “histories” of Christianity by Bishops Irenaeus, Eusebius, etc. Stripping away those apparent distortions of Peter as a “Christian,” we are left, yet again, with a Peter who was NOT a Christian, but who instead remained, till the very end (whenever and wherever his anonymous end occurred, whether in Rome as the Vatican claims, or in Jerusalem, which is far more likely), a loyal follower first of Jesus, and then of James, as a proud Jew.

Far from Peter’s having been the “First Pope” of the Roman Church, he was never a pope at all, nor even a Christian at all; and he was, in fact, so obscure a figure that, in his own time, the only person who mentioned him at all was his student, Christianity’s creator, Paul. But the real key to understanding these matters is nonetheless the testimony of Paul, who personally knew Peter, James, John, and perhaps others of the disciples of Jesus. Paul is the only writer known to history who knew Jesus’s disciples. Other writers are alleged to have, but there exists no evidence that any of them did; and no writer known to history (not even Paul) knew Jesus. Even Josephus wasn’t writing of Jesus’s disciples from his personal witness of them. Nor were Josephus’s writings about these figures directed to, and being read immediately by, congregations of people who likewise possessed personal knowledge of those disciples, as was the case with Paul’s letters. Paul’s audience was of this unique kind, which constituted a powerful restraint against Paul’s ability to lie in the most blatant and explicit of ways, for otherwise such frauds by him would have been immediately discredited by Paul’s readers. That’s one of the great legal/forensic advantages of Paul’s authentic letters over the Gospels and other New Testament documents. Josephus’s readers, in this regard, were such as to make Josephus’s evidence regarding the disciples far lower quality than Paul’s – and Luke’s readers were likewise no such restraint against lies. Therefore, clearly, Paul’s letters constitute legally/forensically the best evidence upon these matters, even though rabidly dishonest and biased and thus standing in need of stripping away their Pauline agenda, as we’re now doing, for the first time in history.

And, of all evidence concerning the event that created Christianity, nothing can compare with Paul’s eyewitness account of that momentous occasion, which he provides in Galatians 2:11-21.

This is the explosive moment at which the Christian religion entered the world.⁵⁵ It can be understood only in the context of understanding Paul’s relevant personal background; and, fortunately, Paul provides this, too, within Galatians. Galatians is therefore the smoking gun of the hoax that is the Christian religion.

Unlike the scholars and other religious teachers who focus upon first the fictitious Christ and then the fictitious Peter in order to “understand” how Christianity started, a legal/forensic analyst takes the scientific approach, which is interested instead in reality.

Here’s the little that we know of Peter, and the much that we know of the creation of Christianity, based upon Galatians and Paul’s other authentic letters, and as supplemented by less-reliable Christian sources such as Acts (and the following will summarize the account provided in our first two chapters, and will conclude the present chapter):

Paul (according to Galatians 1:18) had first met Peter three years after joining Jesus’s organization. Peter was his elder in the mission to convert Gentiles to this Jewish sect, and (according to Acts 11:2) had back then accepted uncircumcised members, the same as Paul was doing. Fourteen years later (Galatians 2:1), Paul returned to Jerusalem for a council at which he defended his gospel. At this council, Peter (Acts 15:7-12) defended Paul’s practices. So, it’s understandable why Paul (Galatians 2:13) would, immediately after the council, be surprised at Peter’s change of position, and call Peter a “coward, … and even Barnabas was swept along by their hypocritical action.” The “men who had been sent by James” were finally laying down the gauntlet to Paul, and demanding that his following of uncircumcised adult male Gentiles were either going to have to go under the knife, or else get out of the sect. If you try to place yourself in Paul’s shoes, you’ll probably feel them pinch so tightly as to break your feet. Paul thus removed those shoes. He was faced with either continuing a very “successful” mission, and enjoying the fellowship of followers – some of whom were of high social status – whom he had no doubt grown to love, and who had looked up to and come to love him; or else hewing to what every indication is had been the Torah-based, standard Jewish, teachings of Jesus himself, and losing those followers and so failing in his life’s work. Paul chose the former; Paul chose “success.”

Years earlier, when Paul was still trying to work within the Jesus-sect, and before he was forced to make his choice between Jesus and “success,” Paul had put the matter this way, in 1 Corinthians 9:22-25: “I have become all things to all men, so that by all possible means I might save some. I do this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings. Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? So, run in such a way as to win the prize. Everyone who competes in the game undergoes strict training. They do it to win a crown that will not last. We, however, compete to win a crown that will last forever.”

Paul competed to win; he won. His prize has lasted for 2,000 years, and still counting.

But then, Paul had to find a “justification” for what he had done. That’s the rest of his mission, starting with Galatians 2:16, “A person is put right in God’s view only through faith, never by doing what the Law requires. ... For no one is put right in God’s view by obeying God’s Law,” and going on through 3:10, and to Romans 2:25-29 & 3:20-4:13, as well as elsewhere.

When Paul wrote, in Galatians 2:16, “For no one is put right in God’s view by obeying God’s Law,” he was saying that no one can achieve salvation by adhering to the Jewish religion. He was saying that any Jew who doesn’t accept Jesus as the foretold Jewish mashiach – and as even more than that; namely, as an object of worship despite the first three of Judaism’s Ten Commandments prohibiting that – will spend an eternity in hell, by the judgment of God. A more sweeping condemnation of Jews and of Judaism would be impossible. Paul’s repudiation here of Judaism and of Jews (of non-Christian ones, that is) is total. In this light, we can clearly understand why Paul stated in Philippians 3:6-8, that, “As far as keeping the Jewish Law is concerned, ... I have discarded it entirely, for the sake of Christ, and I now consider it to be nothing more than garbage.” In essence, Paul had said the same thing in Galatians 2:16, where he additionally explained the reason why he viewed Judaism to be “garbage.” God, explained Paul in Galatians 2:16, treats Judaism as garbage. Paul cited God as his own authority for considering Judaism to be garbage. (Paul had already, in Galatians 1:5, prepped his readers for this, by saying, “To God be the glory forever and ever! Amen.” Paul was there asserting that God possesses high enough authority to trash Judaism, and Paul now exploited this authority in 2:16 by saying that God did trash it.)

Unlike the Jewish dietary laws, which were also a problem that was prominently mentioned as having been raised with regard to the mission to the Gentiles (and which Paul enforced), the circumcision of adult males was a mortal threat in an age without antibiotics and antiseptics, and a living terror in an age without anesthesia.⁵⁶ It was therefore the kind of issue that could very well tear this Jewish sect apart, and it did so. This is revealed unambiguously in the key phrase in 2:2, “I did not want to be and to have been running my race in vain.” It’s furthermore unambiguously and emphatically reiterated in 5:2-3, “Listen! I, Paul, tell you that if you allow yourselves to be circumcised, it means that Christ is of no use to you at all. Once more I warn any man who allows himself to be circumcised that he is therefore obligated to obey at all times the whole Law.” With that, Paul explains why, in 2:2, the success or failure of his life’s very mission is at stake in the circumcision-issue. Clearly, it was not the kosher laws that were behind the blowup in 2:12: Peter didn’t want to be seen dining with Paul’s uncircumcised “converts” in violation of Exodus 12:48-49, and thus sharing in those others’ violations of Genesis 17:14. And Peter especially didn’t want to, because he was being caught violating James’s instructions to him.

In addition to circumcision’s being by far the most dangerous law for these men to follow, it was also the signature-commandment, the one that created Judaism. The Jewish myth said that the covenant was to be signed in blood, and circumcision is how this was to be done. In Genesis 17:23-27, Abraham signed, and had all of his men do likewise.

Galatians 2:2 said that Paul was desperate to avoid subjecting his men to Judaism’s signature-commandment, Genesis 17:14. It was too high a price for heaven. Paul knew that in an age lacking anesthesia, antibiotics, and antiseptics, demanding that his men go under the knife in order to remain his followers would mean losing almost all his followers and thus his life’s work. His solution was inevitable, under the circumstances, given that he worshipped power and thus sought personal success above all else (1 Corinthians 9:22-25); so, he placed heaven on sale: Galatians 2:16.

He was the supreme mass-marketer of all time, and he had to perpetrate the biggest hoax of all time in order to be able to achieve this distinction. The example he set for the future is not one that reflects favorably upon the economist Adam Smith’s famous endorsement in 1776 of reliance upon the “invisible hand” of God. Paul’s example shows that, sometimes, this hand turns out to be connected to the brain of a liar and deceiver – no real god at all. The recognition of frauds does not happen automatically; there is no natural law barring fraud, nor does any god’s law. To protect people from frauds is not a bad thing, but is instead the right thing to do; and one of the many virtues of science is to enable such protection to occur. Without science, protection against fraud is impossible, and hoaxers then possess an enormous advantage against their victims: those victims’ faith. But now, science reaches even into this field, where it’s perhaps more necessary than in any other, since, in this field, science exposes (and thus makes less likely the future success of) frauds.

(NOTE: Presumably, by this time, the reader already has a Bible ready-at-hand, and so there would be little point in printing here the complete text of Galatians 3-6.).

We can even go further now, to reconstruct the precise nature of the event that had precipitated Paul’s writing this letter to the Galatians: this is revealed in 5:2-12, in which Paul warns the Galatian Christians of dire consequences “if you allow yourselves to be circumcised”; then reminds them, “You were doing so well!” when they had considered themselves to be pleasing God without circumcision; and Paul pointedly asks them, “Who made you stop obeying the truth?” and he concludes of those men who had induced them to do so – who were presumably “agents from James” (the issue here is the same, and so the proponents likely are as well) – “Let them go and castrate themselves!” This is one of Paul’s strongest expressions of hate against the Jerusalem elders who were the disciples of Jesus. This passage reiterates Paul’s earlier 1:8-9, in which he had repeatedly said, of these men, who “preach a different gospel,” that they “should go to hell!” So, the men who should “go to hell!” should also “go and castrate themselves!” (In 1 Thessalonians 2:16, he had said, “They even tried to stop us from preaching to the Gentiles the message that would bring them salvation.”) He loathed them.

It’s clear from 5:2-12 that the Galatian community had presented Paul with the very real danger of the community’s blowing apart on account of one or more of its Gentile members (and they probably were all Gentiles) having accepted the Jerusalem elders’ command to become circumcised. Once one of the Galatians does that, the others who haven’t are thereby compelled to decide whether it’s this circumcised person, or rather they themselves, who are following the true path to salvation. That’s a prescription for breakup of the Galatian community. Paul understood the danger this threat posed, both to the Galatian congregation as a congregation, and to himself, as the creator of that congregation. He knew that, if the Galatians didn’t unite behind his stand on this, he would lose them, maybe even all of them. And the same outcome would naturally follow for all of Paul’s other congregations. The principle that was involved here threatened everything that Paul had built up during the prior 17 years – all of his hard work, all of his achievements.

This was the emergency for him that had precipitated his writing of this letter, which is the most important piece of documentary evidence in all of human history – the documentation of Western Civilization’s conception-event.

What had precipitated this letter, in other words, was Paul’s outright war against the Jewish covenant, the Law, Judaism itself. As he puts the matter in 5:4, “Those of you who try to be put right in God’s view by obeying the Law have cut yourselves off from Christ. You are outside God’s grace.” He’s here telling these people that regardless of what they might have heard about the Jewish God’s mercifulness/forgivingness, there is one sin that this God will never forgive, and that this sin is Judaism itself. This message is the most intensely anti-Judaic statement that ever could be or ever has been made – even more anti-Judaic than Paul’s later calling Judaism “mere garbage” in Philippians 3:8. After all, garbage isn’t necessarily worse than murder and all other sins.⁵⁷

Moreover, right after the letter’s climax in 2:11-21, Paul had picked up in this same vein regarding circumcision, but here addressing his readers directly (not Peter and the other representatives of James). In Galatians 3 & 4, Paul tells the Galatians that God accepted Abraham not because of Abraham’s obedience – not because Abraham became circumcised and had all of his men circumcised – but instead because of Abraham’s faith. Paul focuses here upon Abraham because Abraham was the person who, in the Jewish legend (believed then by Jews to be history), received from God the circumcision commandment. Abraham didn’t receive from God the food laws – those were later (also according to the Jewish legend) received by Moses. The very fact that Galatians 3 & 4 discuss Abraham and not Moses is yet further proof that the subject of this letter is Genesis 17:14, and not the food laws.

So, now we also know even why Paul strategically opened this letter the way he did: he was, from the very start, trying to convince his readers that he, Paul, knew Judaism as well as anyone, and that they could take his word for it that circumcision was not required, and that the Jerusalem elders were their enemies, and that this is why those elders were demanding the Galatians to circumcise themselves. When Paul said in 1:6, “I am surprised at you! In no time, you are already deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ [namely, Paul himself], and are accepting another gospel,” he was saying to them that they’re about to abandon the very person who has brought them a chance of personal salvation, a chance to be forgiven for their sins and to go to heaven.

Anyone who might have doubted that the teachers of “a different gospel” that Paul was referring to in 1:8 were teachers of the necessity of circumcision, or have doubted that Paul’s letter to the Galatians was directed specifically against those people, or have doubted that those were the individuals he was saying “should go to hell,” or have doubted that circumcision and not the food laws were the issue at the council in Jerusalem and 2:11-21 immediately afterwards, cannot reasonably continue to doubt any of these things now, in the light of 5:2-7, which places all of these matters beyond any reasonable dispute. Yet nonetheless, scholars widely express befuddlement as to whom Paul was condemning in 1:6-9, and they assert that there is simply no way of determining whom those opponents of Paul were, nor what they were advocating; and scholars widely assert that violations of the food laws and not of the circumcision law were the issue in Galatians 2. Despite all such misdirections by scholars, it is now beyond any reasonable dispute whatsoever that Paul’s enemies were agents from James, and were advocating the necessity of circumcision. Scholars may continue to debate these matters. But scientific historians – legal/forensic analysts of historical evidence – won’t. All of these questions are clearly and definitively settled by the evidence, which isn’t merely overwhelming – it’s 100%, so that even Paul’s vagaries and self-contradictions now make sense.

Paul has even opened Galatians 3 by 3:1, asking his readers “Who bewitched you [to think that circumcision remains demanded by God],” and by citing Jesus’s crucifixion as the start of God’s new covenant with mankind. Here, he is presaging Galatians 5:7-8, which says similarly, “You were doing so well! Who caused you to stop obeying the truth? That person certainly was not God, who instead calls you to heed the truth.”

Just as Paul did throughout other parts of this letter, he veiled his meaning at the letter’s opening, and for the same reason he did elsewhere: he didn’t want to call attention to what the issue in this letter was, nor to whom he was attacking in it, unless a given reader already knew those things and needed Paul’s argument against that. In other words, at the letter’s opening, as throughout: Paul didn’t want to do any of his enemies’ work, but only his own. And, from start to finish in this letter, he knew how to pull that off; he was, indeed, the sharpest political operator in all of history.

Furthermore, 5:2-12 indicate that the Galatian community had only recently come under the influence of James’s agents. Paul’s 5:7, “You were running so well until now,” means: these men hadn’t lost anyone to circumcision until just recently. James’s people got to one or more of them and convinced him to become circumcised (1:6 & 5:7). Again, Paul was using here the metaphor (used in Galatians 2:2, 1 Corinthians 9:24-27, and elsewhere) of a race: he and his followers were engaged in a race for heaven, and nothing else mattered in life. James’s men were trying to block them from reaching heaven, said Paul.

The entire context behind this amazing document is thus now clear.

Evidently, Paul’s enemies were in a desperate situation, such that they couldn’t afford to admit to the Galatians what was really at issue between Paul and their boss James. James’s sect simply couldn’t afford to admit that Paul had broken with their group – that Paul wasn’t even accepted any longer as being a Jew, a follower of the Jewish faith. (Of course, no one denied that Paul had been born a Jew; the question here was whether he still remained one. Paul implied to his followers that he no longer was a Jew, but he couldn’t very well say it explicitly, because then the game would be up, for both Paul and James.) Paul’s enemies seem to have been under a constraint to avoid mentioning even that Paul was rejected in Jerusalem on account of his no longer being a Jew. The indication of this is provided in 5:11, where Paul says, “if I am still preaching [the necessity of] circumcision, then why do they persecute me?” This statement might have been referring to such events as were told in Acts 21:21 forward, in which Paul had been rejected and “persecuted” by Jerusalem’s Jews. Paul doesn’t want his readers to understand why those people were furious against him. But Paul nonetheless wants his readers to understand why they shouldn’t become circumcised. He continues here by saying that if circumcision is still necessary, then “the cross … is without meaning” – that Jesus then died for nothing (this reiterating 2:21). Paul, in other words, is here emphatic that those people from Jerusalem have been teaching “a different gospel” (see 1:7, 1:9, etc.), and not what Paul was teaching. Evidently, James’s agents were telling this Galatian community that Paul didn’t really repudiate the necessity of being circumcised. We don’t know what reason James’s men did give out to the Galatians to explain the riots in Jerusalem against Paul (Acts 21:21 forward), because no accounts survive from the community of followers of Jesus/James. All that we still possess are these records from those people’s enemies: Paul and his followers. 5:11 is telling the Galatians, in effect: “Don’t believe what they say – I certainly do not preach the necessity of adhering to Genesis 17:14, and that’s the reason why I have been persecuted in Jerusalem.” Yet, even while he is telling them this, he carefully avoids explaining to these people anything of his opponents’ reasons for opposing him, and for supporting circumcision.

Paul wrote this letter, in other words, not only because one or more of the Galatians had recently become circumcised, but also because one or more of James’s agents had told one or more members of the Galatian congregations, that Paul didn’t really oppose a member’s deciding to become circumcised. Word of this had now become widespread amongst the Jesus-followers in Galatia. Whatever else James’s agents might have presented as parts of their argument that circumcision was still necessary, this part of their argument apparently caused Paul to respond on an emergency basis, by letter, rather than to wait until he might subsequently visit Galatia to reply to the challenge. This letter, Galatians, was sparked by that emergency, because Paul recognized that, no matter which of James’s agents had said it, this allegation was calling Paul’s “bluff” on the circumcision issue, and was forcing him to come out clearly against circumcision if he possessed the nerve to do so, or else to back down and get in line with James’s order, and with the Torah. Paul possessed the nerve, and Galatians was the result. Paul wrote this incredibly revealing document in response to that do-or-die challenge from James’s side.

The only thing additional that James could possibly do now to carry out his order (that Paul must get all of his men circumcised) was publicly expel Paul from the sect and so sever Paul’s congregations from James’s organization; but James didn’t do that. Paul called James’s bluff, and won.

Paul continued raising funds for the indigent followers of James in Jerusalem; Paul continued to keep James on a financial leash which prohibited James from informing Paul’s followers that they were no longer really in James’s organization. Paul successfully ended up taking his followers with him; and, for all future generations, Paul’s followers had nothing more to do with James’s organization, financially or otherwise, because James’s organization died out – perhaps it was exterminated by the Roman forces. All that remained (other than the vast majority of individuals who followed neither James nor Paul) was, on the one side, Paul’s organization – the nascent Roman Catholic Church – and, on the other, Jews who didn’t accept Jesus as having been their mashiach: those Jews could see, very clearly, that the historical Jesus hadn’t been what was foretold in the Old Testament as their mashiach. The split was, by that late a time, past history, and final.

Scholars cannot, and really don’t even attempt to, explain what occasioned this letter of Paul, what shaped it, and what its message was intended by him to be on that momentous occasion. But all of these things are right there, right in the letter itself, for anyone who really wishes to understand the letter. However, in order to be able to read these things from it, one must be reading the letter as a document for scientific analysis, as an object of nature; not as a document for religious analysis, as an object of “the supernatural,” such as scholars do when they take the letter on only its explicit level and fail to probe deeper without the prejudice that simply assumes this letter to be honest. The difference is like contrasting day and night.

The scholars have no basis (other than their desire to support faith) for believing that the conflict in 2:11-21 concerned the food laws, and that Paul’s opponents were “Judaizers.” Those widespread allegations by scholars are unquestionably false. All of the evidence decisively contradicts those completely unfounded scholarly beliefs.

Why, then, does history not record that Paul’s Jerusalem enemies ejected/excommunicated him from the Jesus-sect? The obvious reason is what was just stated: that Paul’s followers succeeded in becoming the “Christianity” that we today know as such. And, as was furthermore indicated, it’s unlikely that Paul was ejected. To eject Paul would have meant ejecting also his maybe thousands of followers as not true followers, and members, of the Jesus-sect. This could have meant ejecting a large portion of the sect’s own “success” – a large part of James’s personal success. Try to place yourself in James’s shoes, and you’ll understand his tragic situation: he was trapped.

Success can become an addiction, and an addiction is a trap. Any organization is reluctant to fire its “best” salesperson and say, to his customers, “Here’s your money back; your salesman cheated you; he misrepresented our product or service; it’s not really what he said it is.” And although the real “currency” that measures success in any membership organization is increase in the numbers, or inventory, of members, not of money, money itself helps crucially in building that; and Paul’s mission (since it was directed especially at converting those who possessed money and power) was also valuable to the sect because it was bringing in a much wealthier class of members. Romans 15:27 urges Paul’s Roman followers that, “the Gentiles ought to use their material blessings to help the Jews,” right after acknowledging in 15:26 the need “to help the poor among God’s people in Jerusalem”; and 2 Corinthians 8:13 says, “since you have plenty at this time, it is only fair that you help those in need.”

Behind, not on, these amazing lines from Paul, stands a tragedy which might surpass anything the ancient Greeks ever imagined: Paul and James were the bitterest of enemies who, nonetheless, needed each other desperately. Paul needed James’s tacit acceptance to continue for long enough a period so that Paul’s new religion would develop sufficient respectability to be capable ultimately of breaking publicly with Judaism; and James needed Paul’s congregations to continue as being James’s, so as to permit Jesus’s terribly poor and powerless people to survive another day in their incredibly hostile political and social environment. Furthermore, Paul was James’s best salesman or recruiter; and, therefore, James depended largely, and increasingly, upon Paul for his, James’s, own success.

Thus, from the leaders on both sides of this divide, there was silence about the deeper reality, whose prisoners they both were. In historical retrospect, we can see that Paul emerged the victor, but James’s situation was hopeless in any event. James, as was noted, was trapped. For him to eject Paul and his many followers would have meant the virtual suicide of the organization he headed. James could send representatives to the Galatians – he could send the men whom Paul said should “go and castrate themselves!” (5:12) and “go to hell!” (1:8-9). But James couldn’t afford to put his foot down and eject Paul’s followers who disobeyed what he was thereby urging them to do.

However, a strong positive side would also have existed, from James’s standpoint, in his actually making such a clean break: if James had publicly renounced Paul soon enough for Paul’s charade to be exposed for what it was, then Christianity might possibly have collapsed aborning, in which case there would have been no Crusades, no Inquisition, no Holocaust, and none of the rest that Jews suffer from anti-Semitism that derives ultimately from John 8:44, etc., written by Paul’s followers. But James probably had no idea of this future reality; indeed, he would almost certainly have been shocked to know of it.⁵⁸ And yet, Paul’s charade would, also almost certainly, have collapsed if James had put his foot down.

Imagine Paul’s situation if James had kicked Paul out: Paul would have continued to sell his discounted salvation, but there would have been few if any new takers. Jesus’s appointed successor, James, would have, in this alternative scenario, publicly announced that Paul’s people weren’t followers of “Christ” or the mashiach. Paul’s (few if any) Jewish followers would thus now be abandoning him, and only Gentiles would remain; Paul would be telling these Gentiles to worship the Jewish mashiach, and that the Jewish God will accept them in heaven for doing so. Such a fraud would be too obvious even for a master con-artist like Paul to pull off. Paul needed James’s at-least-tacit acceptance; and he received it.

James wasn’t as intelligent as Paul. James had no such understanding of the way the world works, which could compete with Paul’s genius in that regard. Paul understood the workings of society deeply enough to be able to shape human history for thousands of years to come; James, quite evidently, did not. Thus, little could James have understood the historical stakes here (that’s the sort of thing the present book is explaining, so that such mega-hoaxes won’t be so likely to succeed in the future). Little could James understand that his (Jesus’s) movement wouldn’t shape history, but that Paul’s movement – in opposition to it – would. Little could James understand that terminating Paul’s movement was vastly more important to James’s long-term ends (the security of the Jews) than was preserving his own movement. To put the matter bluntly: James was a failure both because he was up against immense odds, and also because he faced the most formidable individual opponent in all of human history; and Paul was a success because he was supremely brilliant, ruthless, and ambitious.

James felt himself to be hostage to his best salesman. But that’s because James placed too high a priority upon retaining his members. He probably did the very best he could, on the basis of his limited understanding. Nonetheless, his ongoing decision not to call Paul’s ultimate bluff was quite possibly the biggest executive blunder in all of human history (even though his doing that would have produced the quick failure of both himself and Paul). Or, at least, it seems to have turned out to be such a blunder for Jews, who, after all, were the people that James was tasked with representing as best he could.⁵⁹

Additional evidence that James concluded that his success depended too much upon Paul to permit Paul’s being overtly and publicly expelled from the sect, is provided in Paul’s remarkable line, Romans 15:31, “Pray that I may be kept safe from the unbelievers in Judaea, and that my service in Jerusalem may be acceptable to God’s people there.” So, not only did Paul continue to solicit from his Gentile followers financial contributions for Jerusalem’s poor, but he continued to represent himself to his followers as hoping to “be acceptable to God’s people there”: namely, to James, and to James’s followers. Obviously, this presumes that the Roman congregation had not been informed from Jerusalem that Paul was excommunicated. (Paul knew that they hadn’t, because if the congregations had heard, then Paul would immediately have received from them communications saying he was no longer a member of the sect.)

Another interesting feature of Romans 15:31 is its reference to “Judaea” instead of to “Israel.” When Paul referred to Jews who didn’t accept Jesus as the Messiah, or to Jews who did but who rejected his Christianity, he represented them as mere “Judaeans” instead of as “Israelites,” because he wanted not to remind his readers that these rejectionists were themselves believing biblical Jews – i.e., heaven-bound Israelites. Thus, yet again, Paul’s word-choice, this time in Romans, was cunningly and stunningly careful. He was nothing less than a PR genius.

As much as Paul hated James, and as much as James deplored Paul’s “gospel of Christ,” both men were locked into a mutual dependency that produced secrecy from both, and that has hidden till now how Paul’s church, Christianity – specifically the Roman Catholic Church – actually started.

Paul was, in effect, challenging James to choose between James’s own “success,” versus authenticity to Jesus’s cause, which was simply Judaism. Jesus had appointed James as the person to make such decisions as this; Jesus had entrusted this particular brother of his with that decision-making authority. Jesus had chosen James as the person who would, if need be, sacrifice even James’s own “success,” just as Jesus himself had sacrificed his own life. For around 20 years, James had been making the wrong decision. And now he was caught in the vise of its consequences. The longer James failed to extricate himself and Jesus’s sect from this vise, the more dependent he became upon Paul and the sect’s Gentile “members.” The drug-addiction analogy fits well. By means of his actions, James didn’t merely state, but he actually demonstrated, his top priority: his own “success” was more important to him than was his and his brother’s religion (Judaism). That’s why, when push finally came to shove, James reverted back to the very same passivity which had caused him, and Peter, during the prior twenty years, not to demand circumcision. James, it turned out, was like Paul in one important respect: he was addicted to “success”; he simply couldn’t let it go.

Therefore, too, the events spoken of in Acts 21:21 forward (and which Romans 15:31 refers to in its opening prayer for Paul’s safety against attacks by Jews), were probably viewed by the Jesus-sect elders in an essentially passive way; these men couldn’t bring themselves publicly to repudiate Paul, even though he was so reviled by their followers and by virtually all other Jews. The Jesus-sect elders stood by and watched the disintegration of their organization. Further strong indication of this outcome is that Acts itself makes no reference at all to the event that Paul implicitly describes first-hand in Galatians 2:11-21: the very moment when Christianity was created, the moment when it broke away from being a sect of Judaism and became a new religion with its own new covenant or “gospel of Christ.” Acts 21:25 even, in effect, denies that the event occurred: it presents Paul, upon his subsequent trip to Jerusalem, as still being subject to the same rule regarding Gentile converts that was imposed upon his mission by James’s letter reproduced (accurately or not, we don’t know) in Acts 15:23-29. This implicitly denies James’s change-of-instructions that Paul implicitly and far more reliably reported in Galatians 2:11-14. If Paul had been publicly expelled from Jesus’s religious organization, then that would have become known throughout all the congregations; and, even after Paul’s death, when Acts was written, there would have been public knowledge that 21:25 was false, because Paul’s instructions would have been publicly changed. Luke couldn’t have gotten away with such a falsehood; but he probably didn’t even know himself that it was false. Why would Paul have told him? Indeed, why would Paul have ever told anyone? Only the witnesses to the event recounted in Galatians 2:11-21 would have known, and perhaps they were all under instructions, from James and Paul respectively, not to discuss it publicly, unless and until the other side forced this issue by doing so – which, for very understandable reasons, never happened. Paul, in Galatians, couched his description of this event in such cautiously veiled terms that it took 2,000 years for anyone to be able to reconstruct what they refer to. No doubt, Paul was hoping that every witness to that event, and every participant in it, including James, would simply keep silent about it until death, which, apparently, is precisely what happened.

Furthermore, as was mentioned, James’s people were terribly poor; Paul’s followers were much better-off and included some who were well-to-do; James’s community had evidently developed a deep financial dependency upon Paul. Paul wanted to make clear to his Galatian readers in 2:10 that, “All they asked was that we contribute to the poor in their group, which I insisted upon doing anyway.” Paul was, in effect, telling them that all they have to do in order to win salvation is contribute a few coins; they don’t need to go under the knife in order to have an eternal afterlife in heaven. By Paul’s thus continuing the collections for the poor in Jerusalem, encouraging his followers to contribute, he further imprisoned James into silence. This made addiction-withdrawal even harder for James, because not only would he personally suffer – his people in Jerusalem would, too. He was multiply trapped.

Therefore, it’s tragically obvious why Paul was probably not publicly expelled. In any case, however, the Jesus-sect didn’t survive to contest the “historical” accounts provided by Paul’s followers; the sect died out; perhaps it was crushed by the Romans when they destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE.⁶⁰ Christianity, in fact and not only in name as in Acts 11:26, actually started in Antioch (present-day Antakya in Turkey, near the northeastern tip of the Mediterranean), at Paul’s headquarters, in about 50 CE; not in and around Jerusalem during the lifetime of Jesus. It was Paul’s followers, not Jesus’s, who wrote the New Testament, and who built Christianity.

The Jesus sect of Jews shared the fate of Judaism in the Roman Empire, because it was part of Judaism; and it didn’t survive, because it was left as a weak and small sect within a defeated religious community. Paul’s new Gentile religion was both larger and stronger, within its predominantly Gentile world.

All aspects of this exegesis or interpretation of Galatians will naturally be challenged by scholars, mainly upon the basis of their taking as truthfully intended by Paul various statements that were actually intended by him to mislead and to deceive the reader – just as they have, indeed, misled everyone for two thousand years.

One such scholar, in a communication with this author, challenged my view that Galatians 2 refers to any important “council in Jerusalem,” because Paul said in 2:2 that this was merely “a private meeting,” and scholars generally prefer to think of all important meetings among early Christians (which scholars typically refer to as “councils” or else as “conferences”) as having been public. Scholars don’t assume the same regarding non-religious history, but that’s the point: the same rules are followed regardless, and these rules are natural, not supernatural. Any leader can lie, and his lies can shape both history and our world. Many scholars also assume that an individual’s actions cannot shape history in any major way, but are only “epiphenomenal” to history, or shaped by it. That, too, is wrong, as the present example shows.

Scholars don’t like to think of there having been any secret or private event that was important in the founding of Christianity, because this would violate the scholarly assumption of supernaturalism, which is essential to a religious/scholarly “understanding” of religion and even of history itself; it would expose the magicians’ tricks behind the amazing “history” that’s told in the New Testament and similar frauds.

My reply to this scholar was the legal/forensian’s rejection of the scholarly assumption that Scriptural documents such as Paul’s letters are necessarily honest. The authors of Scripture can and do lie. In fact, since they’re writing for an audience of faith, they know that lying will almost certainly work. An audience of faith virtually invites fraud. They crave to believe. This scholar was an example of that.

What Paul describes in Galatians 2:2 as “a private meeting with the alleged leaders” was, in fact, the precipitator of the creation-event of Christianity; it was a council in Jerusalem which was a closed meeting of only the top people, to deal with Paul, and no mere “private meeting,” nor was it an open meeting of all of Jesus’s followers, nor did Paul attend it due to “a revelation” as he asserts: he was demanded there by James, the group’s leader.

Paul doesn’t want to acknowledge these things to the group’s followers in Galatia, because he doesn’t want them to know that the way in which Paul had “converted” them into the group was a matter of hotly debated legitimacy amongst their group’s leaders, and was finally ruled by the group’s leader to be false. This fact had to be kept a secret from Paul’s readers. We’re extracting it by employing legal/forensic science, which didn’t even exist in the time of Galatians. (In fact, the legal/forensic interpretation of documents didn’t start until after WWII, when the first-ever white-collar criminal prosecutions took place.)

Galatians cannot be truthfully understood without understanding this crucial historical background: The letter was occasioned by one or more of Paul’s Galatian followers having declined Paul’s new religion in favor of James’s Jewish sect that Paul had originally brought this now-circumcised man (or group of men) into. This is why, near the end of Galatians, Paul says, in 5:1-2, that any of his followers who does what James is demanding, will be consigned by God to hell (just as 1:8-9 had said that the men who had persuaded one or more of them to become circumcised should). At the letter’s beginning, in 1:6-9, Paul had said that anyone who tells others to become circumcised, as James was telling them to do, will be consigned by God to hell, and he reinforced this point yet again near the letter’s very end, by implying, in 6:12, that James and the disciples were the actual guilty persons behind the Crucifixion of Christ. This dark and hazy smear was actually a more targeted version of an earlier-stated, broader, smear, in 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16, against “the Jews,” meaning against all supporters of the covenant. That passage had been the climax to one of Paul’s autobiographical passages, 1 Thessalonians 2:2-16; and it, too, cannot be properly understood unless one understands truthfully what Galatians was all about, which is circumcision. One cannot understand truthfully the other letters by Paul if one fails to understand truthfully Galatians, which is the key to understanding the New Testament.

6:12 is a statement like 2:11-14, intentionally vague in meaning; but among the things in it that are clear is that the people who are demanding the Galatian Jesus-followers to become circumcised are afraid of being persecuted for the cross of Christ, or persecuted for the Crucifixion. Paul wrote this approximately four years after the event that occurred in the year 49 or 50, which he describes in 2:11-21. Already at the time he wrote this, at around the year 54, he had written 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 approximately three years earlier; and so we know that he had already been alleging during the past few years that the Deicide was by Jews, and not by Romans. Paul is now saying that the Jews who were demanding circumcision are afraid of “being persecuted for the Crucifixion.” Would Galatian readers in the year 54 have understood this reference as meaning that Roman authorities might “persecute” someone for having crucified Jesus? Even the Gospel accounts acknowledge that Roman authorities did it, so why would Roman authorities now be “persecuting” someone for having done it? However, if the “persecutors” here were themselves Jews (presumably Jews who were angry at the people who did it), then 6:12 could make sense. Paul’s statement here could make sense only on that assumption, and so that assumption is logically necessarily implied in 6:12. Therefore, Paul was clearly suggesting here to his Galatian readers – who possessed no first-hand knowledge of who did it – that the people who did it were Jews who are now (in about the year 54) demanding circumcision. He is here saying, in effect, “We are the good Jews who became followers of Jesus, and they (the Jews who are demanding circumcision) are the bad Jews – they were behind the Crucifixion, and they are now trying to avoid being persecuted for that; they are hiding under a false claim to be the purest Jews of all.” (Perhaps he was here explaining to his gulls why Rome was persecuting James’s men. Paul’s gulls were confused, and accepted being confused, because faith was to be their pathway to heaven.) In other words: The allegation, in all four of the canonical Gospel accounts of “Jesus,” that law-obsessed Jews were behind the crucifixion of Jesus, was promulgated by Paul, even before it was ever written into Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. However, when Paul was writing, such an allegation (that Jews were behind the Crucifixion) was still too blatantly false to be able to be expressed explicitly, so Paul was spreading it only implicitly: He was insinuating it, whereas his followers who wrote the canonical Gospels decades later, created their “histories” explicitly around this lie – a lie Paul had cooked up initially to increase the suspicions and fears his congregations would hold against Paul’s enemies in Jerusalem. Paul was telling his readers, in effect: “I am the true follower of Jesus; they are only fake followers.” He was thus here reinforcing what he had implied in 1:1: that, unlike the disciples, who had known Jesus in-the-flesh, Paul’s authorization came purely from the Resurrected Christ: the Holy Spirit untainted by corrupt flesh. Right at his letter’s start, Paul was already preparing the way for this con, that his enemies (and not the Roman regime) were behind Jesus’s execution – an essential con, in order for Paul’s new faith to stand any chance of ultimately winning over the Emperors in Rome.

This deflection of the source of the Crucifixion away from the Emperor and his regime, who actually did it, and onto Paul’s enemies the Jews, would make possible future Emperors worshipping a man whom one of their own predecessors had actually executed. It would thereby make possible future Emperors adopting and spreading Paul’s religion. Without the Deicide charge against “the Jews,” Paul’s new religion would still have been a sale on heaven, but it would never have been adopted and spread by Rome. It would just have been Judaism at a discount, appealing only to the masses.

Paul had cut himself off from the people of his birth, the Jews, in order to bond himself, and his future heritage, to Rome, the very power that he knew had actually crucified Jesus.

However, apparently, his loyalty was already to Rome, even before he announced himself for Christ. In Acts 22:27-28, Luke quotes Paul as saying that he was a citizen of Rome “by birth,” in other words, by descent from a father who had become designated a Roman. Paul enjoyed the privileges of Roman citizenship because his father did. This necessarily predated Paul’s Christianity; Jesus possibly hadn’t even been born yet, and Paul was already both a Roman and a Greek Jew, and was therefore already set upon a path to emerge ultimately as Jesus’s enemy – which he, of course, became.

How common was it for a Greek Jew, Paul’s father, to win citizenship of Rome in that time? What did a Jew from Tarsus – Paul’s hometown and presumably therefore also the residence of his father – need to do in order to become a Roman citizen? Tarsus was a distant outpost of Imperial Rome, near the southern tip of present-day Turkey, just 100 miles across the bay from Antioch (now called Antakya), and Antioch is the city where Paul ultimately set up his missionary headquarters. Tarsus was located about 500 miles straight north of Jerusalem; Jews were only a minority there. The rest of the population accepted the Roman gods, and before them the Greek gods. Jews were outsiders there. And yet, Paul’s family were accepted as citizens of Rome – a status granting them special rights.

Acts 18:3 states that Paul was a tentmaker, and so his primary or sole customer was probably the Roman Army. In that era, almost all men followed in the same profession as their father. So, Paul’s father was probably likewise a tentmaker, similarly in the service of the Roman Army.

This would have been during the reign of Tiberius’s predecessor, Augustus.

The contemporary historian Suetonius wrote about how a non-Roman became a citizen of Rome during the reign of the Emperor Augustus. Augustus was the first Emperor to be called, during his reign, “Pontifex Maximus,” the title that the Popes subsequently adopted for themselves. Suetonius, in his lives of The Twelve Caesars, in the 40th chapter of his biography of Augustus, said:

“Augustus placed great importance upon not tainting Roman blood with that of the inferior races outside, and was consequently most sparing in his designations of new citizens of Rome. He likewise granted freedom to only very few slaves. On one occasion, [his successor] Tiberius requested that Augustus grant citizenship to one of Tiberius’s Greek retainers, but Augustus answered that in order to consider doing so, the applicant would first have to submit himself to a personal interview with the Emperor, in order to prove himself deserving of such high honor. When [Augustus’s wife] Livia made a similar request regarding a certain Frenchman, Augustus declined outright, saying that he would do no more than to grant him a holiday from the year’s taxes, because, ‘I would rather that the Government suffer the loss of that income than that the value of Roman citizenship be cheapened.’”

So, according to Suetonius, the only way to become a citizen of Rome, other than to be born a Roman, was to be recommended by a friend of the Emperor, and to apply and appear then in person directly to the Emperor. Furthermore, during the time of this particular Emperor, Augustus (the immediate predecessor of Tiberius who executed Jesus), only people who performed especially high service to Rome were granted this high honor.

Evidently, then, Paul’s father had probably performed some extraordinary favor to Rome, during the time of the Emperor preceding the one who crucified Jesus.

In any case, Paul’s father’s status, once so designated, would have been somewhat like that of a citizen during the British Empire, from India or from some other colony in that Empire, who, having performed services which the Crown deemed to be of special value, became knighted by the King or Queen, and thus a “Sir,” and not merely a “Mister.” Such a person wouldn’t thereby become a member of Britain’s House of Lords; Paul’s father wouldn’t have been a Roman Senator under that assumption; but Paul’s father would still have been, by Imperial action, an aristocrat in his time; and Paul would have inherited this designation of “Roman citizen,” as a born aristocrat, thanks to his father’s loyalty to the Roman Emperor.

This is the sort of thing that the Roman Emperor had the power to do for a family of Jewish commoners who lived at that time in Greece, and Paul’s respect (if not his warm regard) for the Caesars would be especially understandable in this light.

Perhaps Paul’s father might even have been the “Greek retainer” of Tiberius – that is, of the Emperor who crucified Jesus. Perhaps not. We don’t even know whether that “Greek retainer” won the Roman citizenship Tiberius sought for him from Augustus. We know only that Paul’s father very likely did.

It’s therefore almost inevitable that the reason Jesus’s followers were so suspicious of Paul when Paul first entered this sect of Judaism was precisely because of Paul’s family background of being supporters of the regime that had crucified Jesus.

In any case, when Paul cast aside his Jewish heritage, he remained loyal to his Roman heritage, of which he might understandably have been far more proud, given the power-realities in the Roman Empire, and given Paul’s worship of Power (The Almighty).

And this heritage, it’s also clear, Paul never betrayed.

In this sense, the Roman Catholic Church was Roman before it was anything else.

Paul’s situation was perilous, but he overcame it by relying upon non-Jews: men who were not circumcised. They – and not Jesus – were his real salvation. In order for Paul to be able to retain his overwhelmingly Gentile following, and to win yet more Gentiles, he had to do away with the circumcision commandment, Judaism’s signature-commandment; and this meant his doing away with the covenant itself, which is what Paul did.

None of this can be understood unless one first understands the pain and danger of circumcision during that ancient time, when medicine was drastically different from what it is today.

This is the reason Paul said in Galatians 2:2 that his own success or failure was now at stake in the decision that James would be making here.

James’s initial decision at this council in Jerusalem, according to both Galatians 2:10 and Acts 15:13-21, was favorable to Paul. Paul doesn’t state what James’s reason for his decision was. But according to Acts 15:19, his reason was “not to place too great a burden upon the Gentiles who are turning to God.” James’s alleged phrase there, saying that circumcision was “too great a burden,” acknowledged a crucial reality that everyone in the First Century took for granted, even though all scholars ignore it: the terror and extreme danger of any medical operation – including circumcision – in that era.

And yet, Judaism, in Genesis 17:14, required that males – even adult males, Paul’s target market – must, as a precondition to being approved of by God and so accepted by Him into heaven, have the medical operation of circumcision performed upon the penis. Surgical fatality rates, from either these operations themselves or the uncontrollable infections that (due to the lack of antibiotics and antiseptics) often followed, were undoubtedly high, even though untabulated in those pre-scientific times.

These fatality rates were made even worse because all medical operations in that era were also customarily preceded by non-standardized procedures to deal with the enormous problem of the patient’s pain (which resulted from the lack of anesthesia). One reason these procedures were non-standardized is that in this pre-scientific era, there were no purified forms available of any drug, such as there are today from pharmaceutical companies; the only forms of drugs that were available at that time were in their natural, generally herbal, forms, with varying and unpredictable intensities of dosages, so that overdosages constituted an ever-present danger, which might sometimes kill. Therefore, physicians commonly underprescribed if an herb was toxic; an undermedicated patient was preferable to a dead one. In some instances, the pre-surgical patient simply drank wine until drunk, and was then strapped down so that his otherwise uncontrolled writhings wouldn’t cause the surgeon’s knife to catastrophically injure him amidst his howling, screaming, and struggling to evade that knife, which, of course, had to be very precisely controlled by the surgeon unless the operation was to be disastrously botched. But surgeons then needed to operate extremely fast, because of this writhing and howling – much faster than today. On other surgical occasions, the extremely toxic bark of the mandrake plant’s root was infused in wine and this potion then swallowed by the patient, producing in him delirium, enabling him to endure the operation, but, in some cases, also producing in him madness, leading quickly to death for some patients. The great advantage of the mandrake was that, if it didn’t kill the patient or else drive him insane, he was so delirious during the operation that he could simply ignore the pain, and thus not writhe so much as to botch the operation.

So, the dangers of death resulting from medical operations in that era were high not only because of the high infection-rates (from the lacks of antibiotics and antiseptics), and not only because of patients’ writhings causing some operations to be botched, but also because of medication-overdosages – which were made yet more frequent by the non-standardization of doses – that were engendered to prevent those writhings. Circumcision was thus far more perilous than it is today.

Therefore, while a non-elective operation to amputate or else to save a person’s life, was sometimes considered to be worth the huge risks, an elective medical procedure, which was not essential for the preservation of the patient’s life, was virtually non-existent in that era, except in the case of male Jewish infants on their eighth day, to become circumcised in accord with Genesis 17:11-12. However, since those infants didn’t know that it was going to be happening to them, they didn’t fear it. Furthermore, they were small and weak. The adult male Gentiles whom Paul was aiming to convert were none of these things. They, of course, had their own agendas, which Paul necessarily had to cater to, in order for him to win them. These men can be expected to have found very appealing Paul’s promises that their joining his religion would cause them to win God’s approval, so that they’d enjoy an eternal life in heaven after their typically brief mortal life, during that pre-scientific era. However, for a great many of these men, the requirement to undergo this medical operation upon their penis, without anesthesia, antibiotics, or antiseptics, as a prerequisite to their being able to join the heaven-bound group, would have been far too high a price to pay, for the mere possibility that they’d be able to avoid the flames of hell resulting from their sins.

After all, even Paul acknowledged that faith would not assure these men of their being admitted into heaven; even Paul acknowledged, as Judaism itself had always done, that salvation required also the grace of a forgiving merciful God.

Paul, therefore, even if he was seen, by a prospective male Gentile convert, as having been unquestionably honest in the promises that he was making to him, was still offering, at best, only a chance of heaven. By contrast, for these men, circumcision entailed the short-term certainty of hell. No matter how drunk a person is from mandrake or wine, he’ll still feel intense pain, and scream, and writhe, if his flesh is being cut into. And everyone in that era knew how dangerous medical operations were.

Furthermore, although the people in that era didn’t know why it was that many individuals who had medical operations performed upon them developed infections shortly afterward, and became gravely ill and some even died – for they didn’t understand that invisible tiny bacteria and viruses were what caused these infections – they still knew about these results: they knew of the high rates of sheer illness and of death that followed any medical procedures in their pre-scientific era. When circumcision was performed upon an eight-day-old infant, these dangers were, perhaps, not so noticeable, because so many infants died during their infancy regardless. The death of an infant wasn’t perceived to be nearly so big a tragedy as it is today in our scientifically more advanced societies. (Perhaps the biggest perceived tragedies from infants’ deaths in that pre-scientific era resulted when a male heir was thereby lost, not so much the baby’s death per se. Intentional infanticides were also more common then, partly because of the unreliability and virtual absence of birth control.) But the men whom Paul was attempting to convert were far past their infancy; these were adults, who knew the deal that Jews were offering them, for an admission-ticket into heaven, and who recognized that, even at its best, the Jews’ deal was extremely costly (in pain) and dangerous. Paul recognized that, if the new religion that he was designing were to stand any realistic chance of becoming a major world religion, then it would absolutely have to appeal to, and to convert, large numbers of adult male Gentiles, because they were the people who, in his era, possessed virtually all the property, and all the power. Women were merely men’s property, and Jews themselves were just a small, poor, and weak, defeated people within Rome’s vast Empire. Adult male Gentiles controlled the body-politic, the economy, and the entire culture, in those times. Paul needed to offer them a better deal than the Jews were offering. By bringing these men into his new faith, Paul wasn’t only adding to his head-count, but he was also thereby obtaining the political and financial clout to be able to recruit still more.

Paul consequently understood the vital necessity of his reaching out to, and winning, large numbers of adult male Gentiles – uncircumcised men – if he was even possibly going to be able to “win the race” and avoid failure (in accord with Galatians 2:2 and 1 Corinthians 9:24), and succeed.

Of course, the New Testament doesn’t speak about any of these things, for the same reason that a sausage-maker doesn’t write about or advertise the way that he slaughters animals and deals with the contents of their intestines, etc., or that a manufacturer doesn’t publicize the working-conditions in his third-world sub-contractors. What sales-document (and the New Testament very skillfully is, collectively, precisely one such, for Paul’s new religion) ever volunteers to discuss such unpleasant realities? As Paul said in Romans 3:4, “you must win your argument” at all costs, including, a few lines later (3:7), even lying, so long as it serves the glory of God; and certainly a tactful omission of details that might hinder this effort was considered acceptable to Paul and to his followers who wrote the New Testament. They displayed in their writings many things that they carefully avoided saying “out loud” or explicitly. Furthermore, just as the typical consumer of any service or commodity doesn’t want to know the unpleasant details of its manufacture or production; so, too, it’s unlikely that Paul’s customers were particularly prying into this gear-grinding, which went on beneath the surface of the heavenly black box (Christ-faith) that Paul and his followers offered them; sometimes, the fantasy is preferred to what might turn out to be a depressing behind-the-scenes reality; and thus, people (especially people of faith, who strongly want to believe) don’t wish to remove (so as to peer behind) the pleasing surface.

So, these unspoken realities simply remained unspoken.

However, the signs of these important omitted details are nonetheless pervasive throughout the New Testament, when it’s viewed through a legal-forensic investigative lens, rather than through merely a scholar’s lens. (For example, scholars even ignore the crucial fact that circumcision was, in the pre-scientific cultures of that era, a high price for one to have to pay in order to be able to join a sect; scholars don’t themselves like to have to consider such unpleasant realities, unless they’re absolutely required to do so, which they have not been in regards to this matter.) One such sign was given in Philippians 3:2, in which Paul referred to those who were demanding that circumcision be required as a prerequisite for admission into the Jesus-sect of Jews, by telling his Philippian readers, “Watch out for those who do evil things, those dogs, the men who insist upon cutting the body.” Another: in Galatians 5:12, he said of these opponents, “I wish that the people who are upsetting you would go all the way, and castrate themselves!” Another: he had earlier, in 2:12, called them “the party of circumcision,” meaning the men who were in favor of circumcising Paul’s adult male Gentile “converts” in order to make these “converts” become real converts to Judaism. Paul’s opponents argued this to be a prerequisite to their becoming converts to the Jewish Messiah. Another: in 1 Thessalonians 2:16, Paul referred to proponents of circumcision as having “tried to stop us from preaching to the Gentiles the message that would bring them salvation.” In confirmation from a lesser, later, hearsay, source, one might also consider Acts 15, discussing the council in Jerusalem that was finally called together by the sect’s leader after Jesus’s death, Jesus’s own brother James, who had by then concluded that he was finally going to have to make a decision on this matter, after decades of his having postponed and postponed it. Were Paul’s adult male uncircumcised “converts” authentic converts to this then Jewish sect, or not? James called Paul before him, to defend Paul’s practice of admitting into the sect uncircumcised men. In James’s ruling that’s quoted there, in Acts 15:19, James said, “we should not impose too much difficulty upon the Gentiles who are turning to God.” With these tactful words (if they are accurately reported there), he was referring specifically to his not imposing circumcision, which was the issue that had been presented just a few lines earlier, in 15:1-5, as having been the central issue that had precipitated this council in Jerusalem.

Why would it have been so? Why would circumcision have been the issue that precipitated the crisis that led Paul ultimately to abandon Judaism? Consider the historical background, and the reason becomes obvious:

Jesus was believed by these people, Jesus’s followers, to have been the mashiach, the Messiah, the Christ, a purely Jewish concept, which, in fact, possessed no meaning outside of Judaism. As was noted before, all followers of Jesus, during his life, had therefore unquestioningly been Jewish themselves, which means that they believed in Judaism, which is the covenant, the commandments or laws of God, “the Law,” as being the sole pathway – obedience to the Law – by means of which one could win the approval of God and so be admitted by God, after death, into God’s heaven. Regardless of whether a particular Jesus-follower had been born a Jew (and probably all who followed him during his lifetime had been), each Jesus-follower at that time had to view himself to be a Jew, inasmuch as his followership of Jesus necessarily meant his believing Jesus to be the Jewish Messiah. Even the earliest of Paul’s own Christians had entered the group on the basis of this distinctively Jewish understanding; only subsequently was that to change, and gradually. So, at the beginning, all of the followers of Jesus considered themselves necessarily to be Jews, even regardless of whether they had been born as such.

In Judaism, the only pathway toward winning God’s approval was a person’s obedience to God’s Law. There was none other, because obedience to God’s Law was the sole requirement in Judaism, the sole condition that a person had to meet in order to be a Jew, and also the sole requirement which, to fail, meant that one was not a Jew. Judaism recognized that even people who tried their best to be obedient to God would sometimes fail to be obedient, and would occasionally “give in to sin,” but Judaism said that God was merciful, up to a point, and forgiving, up to a point; but only up to a point. In Judaism, there were, and are, but two fundamental categories of people: Jews and non-Jews; people who obey God, and people who don’t. Of course, it was believed that everyone who had not signed onto the covenant (via circumcision) and thereby not agreed to obey God, would “live in sin” and would disobey Him. These people were sinners because they were Gentiles; they didn’t even try to obey; they didn’t sign the agreement or “covenant” that God had offered. However, it was also believed that some people who did sign onto the covenant would fail to fulfill their commitments under it, would disobey God, and would thereby forfeit their membership in the covenant-people, the Jews; thus, essentially, reverting to the Gentile status of being non-members, just as if they had never signed in the first place. And, of course, as a man whom some Jews considered to be not only a Jew but the Jewish Messiah, Jesus himself had necessarily been circumcised, just the same as had any Jewish male, including Jesus’s own great ancestor King David, especially because Genesis 17:14 said that no uncircumcised man could even be a Jew (or one of God’s people).

Furthermore, not only was this circumcision-commandment a commandment, but it happened to be the signatory commandment, the one by means of which a male, through his obeying, effectively signed on the dotted line and “agreed” to be a Jew. This was true even if that “signing” was being done by a typical Jewish eight-day-old male baby, who thus would have been far below the age-of-consent in any of today’s more scientific and democratic cultures. From a modern standpoint, a Jewish parent’s having this operation performed upon his infant son in that era was equivalent to that parent’s acting then as the son’s legal agent, signing upon the dotted line on the child’s behalf, by circumcising the baby. However, in that era, there wasn’t even a question about a parent’s authority to decide this for his child; the husband-father didn’t own merely his wife; he also owned the couple’s children. He likewise owned any slaves the family possessed. He owned everything the family had, and therefore he possessed the authority to decide for his son, just as any owner has the authority to do what he likes with his property. So, performing this operation on the infant was taken to constitute that boy’s own acceptance of the covenant that had required this operation, and therefore the boy’s very admittance into Judaism. It wasn’t just a ritual; it was also an extremely important act of obedience to God, the most important act in this person’s entire life, because it announced his commitment to obeying God.

The covenant, which is to say, Judaism, had started, according to the Torah (the core Old Testament legend), when God, in Genesis 17:14, told Abraham, “No uncircumcised male will be one of my people, because he has not kept the covenant with me.” According to 17:24-27, Abraham, even though he was then, according to the myth, 99 years old, promptly had himself circumcised, and proceeded immediately to circumcise all of his male human property, both his sons and his male slaves. Thus, according to the legend that is Judaism, Judaism itself started. Furthermore, in 17:10-14, God had offered His covenant, Judaism, to Abraham the father of the Jews, by saying to him, “You and your descendants must all agree to circumcise every male among you. From now on, you must circumcise every baby boy who is eight days old, including slaves born in your homes and slaves purchased from outsiders. This will show that there is a covenant between you and me. Each one must be circumcised, and this will be a physical sign to show that my covenant with you is everlasting. No uncircumcised man will be one of my people.” When Abraham in 17:24-27 had this operation performed, the agreement, the covenant between God and His People the Jews, was sealed, and Judaism, according to its own mythological account, thus commenced.

In this sense, Genesis 17:14 was for Judaism the very same thing that Matthew 16:18 was later to be for Christianity: the religion’s mythological start. It’s an odd turn of fate that, were the mythological start of Judaism to have been written differently than it was written in Genesis 17 – i.e., with no circumcision-commandment – then the entire Christian myth, including its own mythological start, would never even have been written at all. There would be no Christianity, because the crisis that produced it wouldn’t have occurred. (In other words: The New Testament wouldn’t exist.)

Furthermore, when Exodus presents the important “historical” follow-up to this, after God subsequently laid out, to Moses and to the rest of God’s people, the Ten Commandments, and numerous additional commandments (or “laws”), Moses and the other Jewish leaders are described as memorializing their people’s re-affirmation of Abraham’s circumcision-signature of the covenant, in Exodus 24:7-8, by collecting together the blood that had been saved from the circumcisions of 8-day-old Jewish boys, and sprinkling this blood over the assembled crowd, saying to them, “This is the blood that seals the covenant the Lord made with you when He presented all of these commands.” Moses did this after having read aloud to the crowd all the laws in the book of the covenant (presumably a scroll that listed each law), and announcing, “We will obey the Lord and do everything He has commanded!”

So, to return to our immediate narrative here, the question now for James, Jesus’s brother, concerning the imposition of the circumcision-commandment, related to the covenant itself, and moreover, it related to the very creation of the covenant, and thus, too, in the strongest possible sense, it related to his sect’s breaking of the covenant. This is a question that had never come up during Jesus’s lifetime, because, when Jesus was alive, there was no question about whether or not an uncircumcised man could be a follower of the mashiach; an uncircumcised man wouldn’t be a Jew at all, much less a follower of the mashiach. (See Genesis 17:14.) According to Acts 11:2, the issue about circumcision had originally arisen after Jesus’s death, when Peter was assigned (probably by James) the mission to convert Gentiles, and accepted uncircumcised males into the group. He was, of course, challenged on this by other Jews, but he continued doing it nonetheless, presumably until he was reassigned back again to the main mission, which was, of course, to the Jews, since this was, at that time, strictly a Jewish sect which was trying to persuade other Jews that Jesus was the mashiach.⁶¹

Then, according to Paul’s first-person account in Galatians 1:16, Paul joined the mission to the Gentiles, and, in 2:7, he was preaching to the Gentiles while Peter was preaching to the Jews. Paul had, according to his account (1:18), been preaching for three years to the Gentiles, when he “went to Jerusalem to learn from Peter,” his predecessor and senior in that mission; and (2:1) fourteen years later still, Paul was called back to Jerusalem once again, now to attend the all-important meeting James called of the council to decide what was to be done with Paul’s by-now perhaps thousands of uncircumcised adult male “members.” The issue here was, of course: are they members?

That’s the reason why placing this requirement upon all of these men now, that they must all undergo this “cutting of the body” (as Paul graphically called it in Philippians 3:2), would cause many if not most of them to abandon the sect. That’s what Paul meant in Galatians 2:2, by saying that his life’s work was now at stake. And this is what James meant in Acts 15:19 by saying “we should not place too great a burden on the Gentiles who are turning to God.”

Acts, having been written by a follower of Paul, and not by a follower of James and the Jesus-sect of Jews, doesn’t provide even a hint that James subsequently changed his mind on this matter of circumcision. But far better evidence, Paul’s Galatians, in 2:11-16, implicitly accepts the fact (because it was written so soon after this climactic occurrence, and to people who might have known independently of it) that he had to do so in order for him to be reasonably confident that he would make his case successfully. Paul there indicates – but by logically necessary implication, not explicit assertion – that James quickly changed his mind and sent a delegation to Paul in Antioch ordering Paul to circumcise all his men. The first member of this delegation to arrive was Peter, but he didn’t possess enough nerve to put his foot down to his former student (according to 1:18). The group that came later that day did, and this is why James had sent them, to check up on Peter’s work – understanding that Peter, as Paul’s teacher and mentor, would be extremely uncomfortable carrying out such an assignment. (Probably, the reason Peter was chosen for this assignment was that, as Paul’s predecessor and teacher in the mission to Gentiles, and as a supporter of Paul at the council, Peter seemed the likeliest person to be effective at it.)

This confrontation forced Paul to choose between Jesus and success. He chose success, and the result was the world’s largest religion. Paul’s (and the world’s) first-ever statement of this “gospel of Christ” occurred at the event he recounts in Galatians 2:11-21, and this “gospel” is described in 2:14-21, the original form of his “Christianity,” which replaced the Jesus-sect of Judaism, and replaced even Judaism itself.

Paul, in keeping with his becoming the world’s supreme con-man, followed this replacement (both in Galatians and in his other letters) by his supplying fake “Jewish” arguments for his new faith. He warped what Jewish scriptures said, so as to turn them against Judaism.

And that’s how it happened: heaven on sale.⁶²

And it worked – and how! Paul knew, then, what marketers know now. (Scholars still don’t know it; they’ll be the last to learn it, because as creatures of the Religious Age, their function is to support faith, not to investigate it. To the extent they investigate it, they’re no longer scholars, but become scientists instead.)

When Paul sold his followers on his “gospel,” he was selling them on a piece of “good news,” because that’s what the term “gospel” meant. (The later stories of Jesus’s life and death became capital-G “Gospels” only because each of these stories constituted a different account of the supposed origin of this “good news,” but “gospel” originally referred to the good news itself, and not to any supposed biography of Jesus.) And what was this good news, which Paul sold? It was that you don’t have to go under the knife in order to win eternal life in heaven. In Paul’s time, this was extremely good news indeed!

Paul’s “good news” was/is: Heaven on Sale!

Instead of one’s needing to obey all of God’s laws, a person needed now only to possess faith in personal salvation via Christ’s Crucifixion and Resurrection, and the pathway to an eternity in heaven was now clear. Instead of one’s joining God’s people who were destined for heaven, via the medical operation of circumcision in an era that knew neither anesthesia nor antibiotics nor antiseptics, one now joined God’s people via merely a dunk in water, or even via just a spritz of water – baptism.

Paul, in Galatians 2:16, eliminated the necessity for circumcision as the induction-ritual (or signature) into God’s people. Soon, this induction-ritual was replaced by baptism. However, in Judaism, circumcision didn’t assure a person of entrance into heaven after death; circumcision was instead merely a person’s signature upon the Jews’ contract or covenant with God. In order for a person to be able to enter heaven, in accord with the Jewish myth, more was needed than just this signature: a person needed also to adhere to the contract: to follow God’s Law. And, similarly, in order for one of Paul’s followers to be admitted into heaven according to the myth that Paul created, more is needed than just the initiation-ritual of baptism: the individual must also fulfill the promise of this form of signature, by keeping the faith that Christ’s Resurrection cleanses of sin everyone who possesses such faith. Paul’s follower who added Mark’s ending, lines 16:9-20, wrote there (placing these words into Jesus’s mouth) in Mark 16:16, “Whosoever believes and is baptized will be saved; all nonbelievers will be damned.” Paul himself wrote in Romans 6:3-4, “When we were baptized into union with Jesus Christ, we were baptized into union with his death. By our baptism, then, we died with him … to have, like Him, a new life, granted by the glorious power of the Father.”

The Jews had placed a very high price upon heaven. Paul and his followers lowered this price, drastically; they lowered not only the price to qualify for God’s consideration, which now became only baptism, but also the price to win God’s ultimate approval, which now became only Christ-faith.

Furthermore, as has also been noted, Paul and his followers additionally granted to the Emperor the lawmaking function that the Jews granted only to God, and thereby offered a far better deal to the elite, and not just to the masses.

This is how Paul became, for all time, the world’s most successful deal-maker, who offered an overwhelmingly more attractive deal, both to the elite, and to the masses.

When Paul wrote Galatians, he didn’t know that history would turn out exactly as he had planned and hoped. But we do. We know it now.

This is an account of Christianity’s origins that – unlike the scholarly accounts⁶³ – is fully in accord with the most elementary realities of motivation and of psychology. All the other “historical” accounts, of Christianity’s start, depend upon at least some of the miraclism of the Christian myth.

The rest of this letter to the Galatians consists of reinforcements of the agenda that we’ve discussed. For examples:

After his account of 2:11-21 – the event that actually created Christianity – Paul introduces the third element of the Trinity. The Holy Spirit (the Holy Ghost) enters in 3:14, 4:6, 5:16-18, 5:22, 5:25, and 6:8. This reinforces, yet again, Paul’s superiority over Paul’s enemies, in Jerusalem, who knew Jesus “from man or by means of man.” It also reinforces the superiority of faith (the Spirit) over Law (mere works). Brilliant.⁶⁴

In 3:10, Paul says “Whoever depends upon obeying the Law lives under a curse.” Paul is saying, yet again, that such a person is condemned to hell. Yet again: Only via Christ-faith will anyone find a way to heaven.

3:23 asserts: “Before the time for faith came, we were all prisoners of the Law.” Paul frees his followers from the Jewish Law, so as to enslave them to his lies and thus to himself.

4:4 says: “But when the proper time arrived, God sent his Son.” What the Jewish God in Genesis 17:13 had said must be “eternal” was said by Paul to be now ended.

4:5 continues by explaining why Christ came: “to redeem those who were under the Law,” and not to reestablish Israel’s independence and sovereignty.

4:21 challenges his readers: “Those of you who want to be subject to the Law must heed what the Law says.” Paul’s point is, yet again, that they’re free of the Law.

5:1 asserts directly: “Christ has set us free!” In other words, yet again: because of Christ, one can now go to heaven without first having gone under the knife.

5:4 asserts that “Anyone who tries to achieve salvation by following God’s commandments will be rejected by God.” It’s pure anti-Judaism.

6:11 (which was cited at our start) is remarkable because it asserts, “See what big letters I make as I write to you now with my own hand!”

What an artifact the original letter would have been if it had survived – the most important physical historical object ever. Sadly, it doesn’t exist. But instead, we fortunately do possess copies, which were made of it. Very few written originals from 2000 years ago exist, and few documents survive even as copies; but, by an extraordinary stroke of luck, Galatians is among the latter.

We’re simply blessed – scientifically, and certainly not religiously – that this document, Galatians, exists; because now, with the advent of science, this document exposes history, whereas, before, there was only the Christian myth that Paul had intended, and that scholars have since promulgated.

The biggest blunder of the Roman Catholic Church was that they didn’t only preserve this letter – they canonized it. They performed this blunder prior to the existence of science – at the peak of the Religious Age – and so they had no way to know then that this would become their undoing, in some later Age, the emerging Age of Science.

Finally, the “DNA” in this letter, and in the other authentic Paulines, and in Christianity itself, is exposed.

We can thus now more fully understand why Paul had started this letter with 1:1: “From Paul, whose call to be an apostle did not come from man or by means of man, but from Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised Him from death.” Paul said, in 2 Corinthians 3:6, “The written law brings death, but the Spirit [Christ-faith] gives life.” And here, in his very first line of Galatians, Paul has emphasized not just Jesus’s godhood, but His death and Resurrection, and so has pre-encapsulated the coming climax: that the works of man, obedience to the Law, lead only to eternal death, which can be replaced by eternal life only via one’s faith in the Resurrection. It’s right there, in embryonic form, in 1:1. As Paul said in the climax, Galatians 2:16, “No one wins God’s approval by obeying the Law.” Five lines later, in 2:21, Paul asserted, “For if God approves of a person on account of the person’s following His Law, then Christ died for nothing!” Paul thus started this letter, in 1:1 and 1:8-9, by denigrating the authority of, and by attacking, Jesus’s disciples, Jews, who preached the exact opposite – they preached that only by following the Law could one win eternal life. Paul was waging this war right at the letter’s start.

The rhetorical coherence of this letter is more than stunning; this letter is the supreme masterpiece of sales/PR writing, the proven model towards which today’s most highly skilled in the crafts of persuasion/manipulation⁶⁵ can aspire. As an object of legal/forensic analysis, this letter displays its tactics, which are beyond brilliant. As an object of scholarly speculation, this letter asserts whatever any given scholar wants to believe, which has been little more than pedantic and deceptive, serving Paul and not the public. That’s to continue in the ancient tradition of the academy, as an extension of and preparation for the priesthood. To understand this letter is to know its tactics, and not merely its claims, because its claims are tools toward Paul’s persuasive goals, and those objectives aren’t merely to inform, but are also to deceive whenever deception advances his persuasive ends. To the extent that this letter is understood as to its strategy and tactics, it opens the Pandora’s box of Christian history, and reveals inside the brain that actually shaped Western Civilization.

Christianity’s being a hoax isn’t just maybe so; it is definitely so – proven far beyond any reasonable doubt.

For example, the documents which aver that Jesus appointed Peter and not James as his successor, or as the “Pope” (as the Roman Church subsequently called it), would be excluded from presentation to a jury as constituting “evidence” under the best-evidence principle, which requires that when best evidence contradicts lower quality evidence regarding any particular allegation or inference, only the best evidence can be admitted as “evidence,” when a prosecutor presents a case to be considered by a jury.⁶⁶ Such textual lines as Matthew 16:18 and John 21:15-17 are inadmissible as “evidence” during the Scientific Age, because such lines contradicting them as Galatians 2:11-12 constitute legally-forensically far superior evidence, since they come from a far more reliable source. A judge following the best-evidence principle would be required to throw out the inferior evidence, given this contradiction. (Furthermore, Matthew and John constitute, at best, only hearsay “evidence,” and some courts would throw them out even if the far superior evidence – the authentic Pauline letters – didn’t exist. By contrast, the authentic Paulines present first-person witness testimony; and, for example, in American courts, documents that are twenty or more years old are accepted into evidence if and when the authenticity of the given document is established, such as is the case with these letters; and, moreover, even in hearsay which would otherwise be inadmissible, statements that are against the interests of the alleged declarant are accepted into evidence if the declarant is unavailable to testify. Rules of evidence are more accepting of self-incriminating than of self-exculpatory evidence. As we have shown, the Paulines are full of self-incriminating evidence – such as evidence that outright proves false some of the things that Paul himself asserts.)

The earliest and by far the most reliable evidence regarding the creation of Christianity is entirely consistent. It proves, beyond any reasonable doubt whatsoever, that Jesus lived and died a Jew and was never a Christian, and that all of his followers were likewise devout Jews. And it proves – it even exhibits or displays; it is itself the result of the fact – that, after the incident recounted in Galatians 2:11-16, Paul was no longer one of them, and started his own religion, Christianity. Furthermore, it explains all of the other, inferior, “evidence,” which has served for two thousand years as the “history” of how Christianity started, but which was instead merely the Christian myth.

Paul’s “Christ” was the essential tool for Paul’s success, and Paul used this tool to overwhelming effect.

Paul took a far-from-basic concept in Judaism, the concept of the mashiach (which was unimportant in Judaism),⁶⁷ and transformed it into the basic concept in his entirely new religion, “Christianity.” He did this on account of a basic concept in Judaism, circumcision, which he couldn’t afford even to discuss openly with his gulls.

As we’ve mentioned, Paul didn’t want to include a description of the event that created Christianity, 2:11-21, but he had to do it. This was his hidden confession. He was, here, in exquisitely veiled but stunningly complete terms, confessing, to the Galatians, and ultimately to a Scientific Age posterity (us), that what he was now teaching (what we today know as “Christianity”) – what he was teaching to the Galatians and to all of his other followers – was his own invention, and wasn’t actually Jesus’s and God’s, as he claimed (in 1:1, 1:11, and elsewhere). The rest of his letter confesses why he committed this fraud against them.

Like most confessions, this confession was a result of circumstances, not strictly a voluntary act. However, no prosecutor has forced it from him. This is an eminently admissible confession. And Paul hid the confession as effectively as he could. (Scholars, even today, refuse to see it.) Unearthing this – revealing Paul’s implicit confession – is like finding well-preserved DNA evidence after 2,000 years.

Furthermore, it’s an especially trustworthy confession, because, like one extracted during cross-examination of a witness in court, it has been extracted (in this case, from a document) despite the witness’s (Paul’s) clear desire not to reveal what actually happened – as was mentioned, Paul did hide it as well as he possibly could, and it has worked for a full 2,000 years.

The care he devoted to hiding it is, in fact, directly proportionate to his confession’s credibility. For example, if a letter from Paul were to be found in which he had bragged “I created Christianity,” that wouldn’t be nearly so credible as the confession we actually possess in Galatians. If he had written “I invented the idea that salvation can be achieved just via Christ-faith,” then that wouldn’t nearly match the credibility of Paul’s confession that we possess in Galatians. Here, despite his desire not to admit what he did, he tells us not just that he did it, but how and why and when and where he did it; and every bit of this confession makes sense, and accords with everything else that we know, such as the scariness of medical operations in an era that possessed neither anesthesia nor antibiotics nor antiseptics. Moreover, all of Paul’s other authentic letters support his confession in Galatians.

Legal convictions are commonly obtained upon the basis of cases that are far less consistent, far less comprehensive, far less complete, and far less conclusive, than we are offered in the present instance; and, for this documentation of history, all future generations of mankind can quite reasonably feel extremely fortunate, that such important history (which may be considered to be the most important event in all of history) is, after so long a period of time, finally able to be reconstructed from the existing evidence, with such a stunningly high degree of both confidence and detail, in the understanding of those events.

The highest standard of proof that a court demands, for the most serious of crimes, is “beyond a reasonable doubt,” and what we possess in the present case is indeed that, and then some.

What difference would have resulted if the event that is recounted in Galatians 2:11-21 had – as scholars simply assume – been concerning the food laws instead of circumcision? A huge difference. In such a case, the cause of the blowup here would have been Peter’s disobedience of James’s instruction to impose the kosher laws upon Paul’s congregations), instead of whether or not Paul’s perhaps thousands of adult male congregants were members of the Jesus sect of Jews – whether they were, indeed, Jews at all. The issue here would then have concerned only Peter – not the faith-community or religion itself, and thus not the creation of a new faith.

If the issue here were what scholars assume, that Paul’s men were dining at an un-kosher table, then Paul could easily have corrected the deficiency, simply by ordering in kosher food. However, there’s no indication that he did that. Nor is there any indication, anywhere in Paul’s authentic letters, that Paul wasn’t enforcing the kosher laws anyway. To the contrary, in 1 Corinthians 8, Paul admonishes his followers who still believe in their old Gentile or “pagan” religious customs, telling them (1 Corinthians 8:4) that “an idol represents a false god, and all of us must recognize only the one true God”; in other words, he indicates that the violations his men were practicing were their pre-existing “pagan” rituals concerning food belonging to the gods (8:7). He tells his men that they shouldn’t continue heeding traditional Gentile (“pagan”) rituals pertaining to ancient polytheistic gods. He isn’t telling these people that they can now relax their newly acquired adherence to Judaism’s kosher laws. In 8:10, he advises his men to discontinue serving as models, to others, of traditional pagan food customs, and he specifically condemns any eating practices “for the purposes of idol-worship.” Implicitly accepting Judaism’s food laws in this regard, Paul equates the practitioners of those traditional pagan food rituals to (8:12) “sinning against the Messiah.”⁶⁸ Then, in 10:20, he asserts, “What is sacrificed on pagan altars is offered to demons, not to God. And I do not want you to be partners with demons.” Paul is here telling his men to heed Jewish morality – the Third of the Ten Commandments, in fact – not to heed pagan morality. In 10:32, he says, “Live in such a way as to cause no trouble either to Jews or Gentiles.” This means for them to adhere to all the kosher laws when in the presence of Jews. However, in 10:25-26, he asserts: “You may eat any meat, because Scripture says, ‘Everything on Earth belongs to the Lord.’” Paul wasn’t concerned about all of the kosher laws when there was no practicing Jew present, but he was concerned about the Third of the Ten Commandments (banning idols) when any issue of food came up. He was self-acknowledgedly inconsistent (saying in 10:33, “Just do as I do. I try to please everyone”), but as regards the food laws, he unquestionably favored compliance with Jewish practices, especially in Jewish company.

Clearly, the Corinthians he was writing to were Gentiles, and the laws that they were violating were kosher laws in Judaism; Paul was teaching these men to adhere to Jewish food-laws – not to adhere to their former food-practices, from their prior pagan faith. And so, since Paul was already compliant with the kosher laws, that couldn’t possibly have been the point at issue in Galatians 2:11-21.

Similarly, in Romans 14:1-12, Paul (in 14:3) admonishes omnivores, on the one hand, and vegetarians, on the other, to ignore all food laws, except (14:10-12) the commandments of “the Lord … God,” for, “We shall all stand before God, to be judged by Him” (14:10). Paul was there asserting the Jewish position, unambiguously.

Paul was always faithful to Judaism’s food laws. In this respect, he was doing his job as a salesman for James’s sect, bringing Gentile men into this Jewish sect.

James could take no exception to that, and he didn’t.⁶⁹

Even in Galatians, Paul didn’t tell his followers not to obey the food laws, and he actually had no objection to any of the laws except circumcision. 5:19-21 tells his parishioners that if they engage in “immoral, filthy, and indecent actions, in worship of idols, …” then “I warn you, as I have before, that anyone who does such things will be excluded from the Kingdom of God.” Here, he was telling them to adhere to the covenant, but was carefully avoiding to mention the covenant (“the Law”), which he elsewhere had been saying had been superseded by the Resurrection. And yet, only a few lines earlier, in 5:3-4, he had reasserted this very supersession: “Once again, I am warning that anyone who allows himself to be circumcised is obliged to obey the whole law. Anyone who tries to win God’s approval by obeying the Law has cut himself off from Christ – you are outside God’s grace.” So, the only law that Paul really was condemning is actually the circumcision-law. However, Paul couldn’t very well admit this to his parishioners, because, if he were to have admitted to them that he rejected the covenant because he rejected its circumcision-law, instead of rejected the circumcision-law because he rejected the covenant, then he would have been admitting to them his scam, and he would have lost these followers altogether. Paul apparently expected that they’d be too stupid to recognize his scam, so long as he didn’t state it directly (as I’ve just done here); and the evidence, that subsequent history provides, of Paul’s (i.e., of Christianity’s) stunning success, suggests he gauged their intelligence (or rather lack of it) correctly.

Many scholars refer to the split between Judaism and Christianity as “the parting of the ways” between the two religions. The view that the blowup in 2:12 concerned the kosher laws reflects this mild reading of a “parting of the ways” between the two faiths, but such a phrase misrepresents profoundly what actually happened. What occurred here wasn’t nearly so peaceful and frictionless as such a phrase suggests; it was more like a very nasty, ugly, and even violent, divorce. Acts 21:21 forward describes some of the public expressions of this blowup; but, when Paul, in Galatians, 1:8-9, writing to his followers, said, and repeated, that Jesus’s disciples, who were Jews, “should be condemned to Hell!” for not joining him in abandoning the covenant in favor of Paul’s own gospel of Christ, this was a private expression of his passionate hatred, as was Paul’s venting in 6:12 that those people were behind the crucifixion. And he showed it yet again in 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16; and yet again in Philippians 3:2-8. To call this type of separation a “parting of the ways” is simply grotesque.

In 1 Corinthians 13:11, Paul said, “When I was a child, I said what a child says, and thought like a child does, but now that I have matured, I am finished with childishness.” Paul was here justifying to his now-Christian followers his repudiation of the Judaism that he had previously taught to them. Contrary to Paul’s repeated assertions that his “gospel of Christ” had never changed, he needed to rationalize to his followers the profound changes that his teachings had actually undergone. Belief in salvation via adherence to the Law was “garbage”; it was “childish,” and Paul had “matured.” Paul was now insulting all Jews who did not worship Jesus. But no Jew could worship Jesus – or any other human – because that would have violated the first three of the Ten Commandments; it would have been his abandonment of Judaism, like Paul did.

Indeed, if any Jew says to his rabbi, “I worship you,” then the rabbi is obliged by the very faith he teaches, to respond, in effect, “Then you are no follower of mine, because I teach Judaism, whose First Commandment is to worship no one but God.” Thirteen times in the canonical Gospels (as previously noted here to have been Matthew 26:25&49; Mark 9:5, 11:21, 14:45; and John 1:38&49, 3:2, 4:31, 6:25, 9:2, 11:8, and 20:16), the followers of “Jesus” addressed him specifically as “rabbi.” If any of the authentic Jesus’s followers had ever told him, “I worship you,” he would similarly have been obliged, by the very faith he taught, to respond by saying, “Then you are no follower of mine.” That didn’t happen, because none of the real Jesus’s real followers ever said they worshipped him – they were all Jews and remained as Jews. Jesus’s name and identity were purloined and abused by Paul, whose followers were – like Paul – enemies of the actual Jesus’s authentic followers.

The exegesis presented here differs from all others in its applying legal/forensic – not scholarly – methods of interpreting a document. Unlike any other exegesis of Galatians, it relies not upon the opinions that other people – scholars – have expressed as representing what Paul meant, but rather upon what Paul himself said. This exegesis is therefore a repudiation of scholarship itself for interpreting documents, and an affirmation and embodiment of (legal/forensic) science⁷⁰ as a replacement of scholarship for interpreting documents, so historians will view documents as do courts of law in a democracy.

A typical example of the scholars’ view of the “parting of the ways” is Michael F. Bird’s “Jesus and the ‘Partings of the Ways’,” in the 2011 Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus, v. II. His “Conclusion” there (p. 1215) is that “constituent elements of the Jewish-Christian rift find their germinal roots in the historical Jesus,” and that these “roots” were supposed “points of contention between Jesus and his contemporaries.” By “contemporaries,” he doesn’t refer to the Romans who actually executed Jesus for sedition, but instead to supposed “violent opposition from other Jews.” Dr. Bird takes the Gospel accounts as being historical narratives from followers of Jesus, and his entire article is based upon that false assumption. All of the numerous scholars he cites in supposedly arguing for this conclusion are likewise unquestioning acceptors of the historical veracity of the New Testament. Some of these scholars he cites are Jews, such as the ubiquitous Jacob Neusner (perhaps the world’s most-published scholar, with nearly a thousand works published), who likewise accept unquestioningly the veracity of the New Testament accounts of “Jesus.” Further distancing their accounts from Jesus, some of the primary sources upon which these scholars base their accounts were written centuries after the Gospels, such as the Babylonian Talmud (which was anti-Jesus because it argued against the Gospels and assumed that Jesus was accurately portrayed there). On the basis of these bogus accounts of “Jesus,” by Jesus’s actual enemies, both Christian and Jewish scholars formulate their “historical” accounts of Christianity’s start.

Paul was the most gifted manipulator in all of human history; his skill at the conning crafts was awesome; nobody else comes close. But dissecting Galatians is ultimately a close analysis of a merely mechanical act. What Paul did was purely mechanical; he was no artist. What we have done here in legal/forensically analyzing Galatians is like getting under the hood of a car in order to find out how it’s put together. This is reverse engineering of the evidence, and the evidence here is documents. Billions of Christians happen to think that these documents are holy, and that the Bible is the Word of God. By getting under the hood, our reverse engineering shows that this vehicle isn’t holy; it’s a hoax.

Nothing but ruthless scheming and deceit were necessary in order for Paul to succeed and shape our world more than any other person ever has. He had what it took to do the job. And he did it; he won. During the Religious Age, he took advantage of the religiosity, the faith, of his followers, to fill them with his deceits, and so to enslave them to his goals, for thousands of years.

Our discussion of 1:1 started: “Paul has here, implicitly, CORRECTLY identified his target market … as consisting of RELIGIOUS people: people for whom the most persuasive forms of alleged evidence are not natural … but rather supernatural.” A corollary of this is that a religious person tends to accept assertions to the extent that they’re false, and tends to be skeptical of assertions to the extent that they’re true. It’s not just that religious persons tend to weight evidence from religious authorities over evidence from secular authorities, but rather that scientists weight evidence from their own systematic investigatory researches above any “authority,” and to repudiate the very concept of “authority,” while acknowledging (where unavoidable) reliance upon expertise and findings which have been demonstrated by other scientists. During the Religious Age, hoaxers enjoy this enormous advantage against scientists, because a scientist’s naturalistic arguments encounter, from the audience, more skepticism than do the religionist’s supernaturalistic arguments: hocus-pocus generates credibility, not disbelief, during the Religious Age. Each religion has its supposed “miracles,” which supposedly “prove” the given faith’s truth. Religion is, for the buyer, a way to deal with his fear of death.⁷¹ But for the seller of religion, it’s a way of enslaving buyers to his personal ends (which can likewise be a craving for salvation).

People join a religion for many different reasons, but Paul recognized that the basic reason is fear of death (and similarly the phrase “deathbed conversion” is known everywhere). Paul wanted to scare the living daylights out of his members – he said these people would be beyond salvation if they didn’t join and stay. In Judaism, this is done in order to get members to obey the law, so that God will favor them with heaven rather than with hell after death, and with support and defense of their lives prior to death. In Christianity, it’s done in order to get members to have faith in Christ, so that God will favor them with heaven rather than with hell after death, and with God’s approval (and thus protection) during life. In every religion, fundraising for the clergy is likewise done with this death-focused motivation by the members, so that joiners will belong to God’s people (heading for heaven rather than hell, and enjoying God’s protection throughout life). Eschatological (or death-focused) motivation is the foundation of any religion. Each faith has its tricks to spike this motivation. Paul knew the pattern; he merely applied it to the circumstances of the time (a time that was especially tumultuous, which made his end-times talk especially effective, like saying, “Buy heaven now, while you still can”).

Some religions have variants of heaven and hell. For example, Buddhism has reincarnation and karma, but the basic concept is the same: Be a good person as the given religion defines “good,” and you will go to a better situation after death; be a bad person, and you will go to a worse situation. Fear of death spikes faith in any religion.⁷² This motivation metastasizes in some people – like in the 9/11 bombers, and in the Crusaders – within whom eagerness for heaven exceeds even the fear of death.

We remain in the Religious Age. The Scientific Age is only gestating and hasn’t yet been born; and so, in our era, almost as much as in Paul’s, the most effective way to sell things is still through skillful use of deceits; and thus Paul remains, even today, the model for success.

To speak of a mere “parting of the ways” between Judaism and Christianity is to avoid coming to terms with Paul’s actual legacy. For scholars not to acknowledge what Paul did, is for them not to recognize the scale of his actual achievement. He created Western Civilization: Christianity is Western Civilization’s basis. He worshipped power (its personification in The Almighty), and he became as he hoped: the most powerful person in history.

This deception by Paul was allegedly in worship of the “Prince of Peace”; but the real aim was the peace of the graveyard, the peace that a conqueror brings, after his enemies have all been killed or otherwise subdued by force, which may include (as with Paul) deception – force that’s applied against the mind (fraud), instead of against the body (violence). (There is also a third form of force, which is applied against one’s property: theft.) According to the Jewish legend, which defined the mashiach, the peace that the “Prince of Peace” was supposed to bring was to arrive via his defeating the enemy upon the battlefield in war; it was to be peace via the sword, not via peaceful means. Jesus was no mashiach.

And so it has been; and Paul is his realm’s true King, Christ’s ventriloquist – reigning almost unnoticed from the side, but pleased nonetheless to be the real dictator, over an entire kingdom: his kingdom of mental slaves who have followed after him, such slaves they don’t know the truth even about their master’s identity. It’s Paul, and not Jesus, whom they’ve really been serving.

Christians are, and have been, in fact, mental slaves to an enemy of the very person they thought they had worshipped.

This is how the moral base of our culture was created: by deceit. By fraud. By controlling people through controlling their thoughts. This is how our culture was created.

Paul’s deceit started small, but it became enormous. His deceit began as a means to preserve his phenomenally successful career, but it metastasized naturally into a means for him to continue this success into the future, and for that success to become as big as possible, to continue growing even long after he died. Initially, Paul refused to circumcise his followers, because he knew that he’d lose them if he did, and because he knew that he’d get few if any new followers if he did. But his supreme focus on success became ultimately a cancer within his character, and consumed any decency he might possibly have had. (An obsession with success can be just as dangerous as an obsession with salvation.)

Despite scholars’ myths about “the parting of the ways,” Paul’s separation from Judaism was actually extreme. For example, when he said in 2 Corinthians 3:6, “The written law brings death, but the Spirit [Christ-faith] gives life,” he was condemning the very thing – God’s Law in the Torah – that was the most sacred thing of all to Jews, and he was saying that it’s the exact opposite: the bringer of damnation. Paul couldn’t be more extreme than that, because no one even possibly could be. Paul’s hatred of Judaism, and of Jews (the believers in Judaism), was laser-like, focused only upon them, and unlike anything else in his entire universe of concern.

A prosecutor is handed the evidence by the police, and tries to construct from this evidence a case that serves as a juggernaut against the defense attorney’s arguments. Scholars have amply presented Paul’s defense; I am now presenting the prosecution case against Paul. The jurors make the ultimate judgment. The evidence about Paul has been presented, and is suitable now to be finally judged.

The myths can thus end here. This hoax, which worked for thousands of years during the Religious Age, is herewith exposed, and its exposure provides a suitable marker for the start of the Scientific Age – a marker indicating that, henceforth, science will, at last, dominate over faith.

There have been many repeated references made here to certain lines in Galatians (e.g., 2:16) and to some of the other items of evidence (e.g, Genesis 17:14), and this work has therefore been “repetitious” in that sense. A legal/forensic reconstruction of events, or “theory of the case,” often tends to be this way, because the objective of legal/forensic investigators is to extract, from a given (and sometimes small) “body of evidence,” a historical narrative (or reconstruction of “the crime”) which is as complete as possible, and this necessarily means that sometimes a single item of evidence will be cited in many different contexts, so as to extract from it – or to cite it in proving – a number of different facts about what had occurred. For this reason, the ratio of the information that’s drawn from the items of evidence (or, in scholarly parlance, from the “sources”) tends to be extremely high in legal/forensic analyses. A court may keep out of evidence many unreliable “hearsay” or other “sources,” which a scholarly analysis would admit into evidence, but it will nonetheless seek to provide the most complete reconstruction of events that is possible, from the more-reliable sources. Consequently, a court seeks to extract the maximum of information from the minimum items of evidence, which are precisely those sources that are of the very highest reliability (or “trustworthiness”). And, similarly, the reconstruction you’ve just read here of the start of Christianity has aimed to cite only the best evidence, but to extract from that high-quality evidence the most complete description possible of the start of Christianity.

This exegesis or interpretation of Galatians has contained 41 times as many words (131,119) as does Galatians itself (3,231). (That 131,119 count doesn’t include the word-count from the footnotes.) This 41 multiple doesn’t reflect polluting Paul’s letter by the opinions numerous selected scholars have expressed interpreting the letter, and by asserting that those selected scholars were correct in their interpretations of those particular lines, and that the scholars who disagreed (and who usually aren’t even so much as mentioned by the given scholarly writer) were wrong in their interpretations. This interpretation hasn’t at all been built upon the interpretations by others, but instead upon what Paul himself said, in Galatians, and in his six other authentic letters. Secondary reliance has been placed here upon less-reliable evidence, such as Acts, the Gospels, writings by Josephus and other historians, and so forth. In addition, there has been considerable citation here of passages in the Old Testament, whenever Paul was himself drawing from those particular passages in order to argue for his points, to his audience. In other words, the evidence here has been only the evidence, not opinions that selected other people have expressed regarding the evidence. Instead of amplifying Paul’s words via polluting them by interpretations from numerous selected scholars, we’ve taken, in a metaphorical sense, a real 41× logical microscope to them, in order to be able to observe details, in his letter, which no one was able to see before (because they lacked this methodology). Furthermore, by drawing logically so close to this subject, we’ve been able to identify not only the explicit level of meanings, but also the deeper, logically implicit, level of meanings in them, which Paul’s writing didn’t assert, but instead actually displayed or exhibited.

For a simplified example of this method: it’s like interpreting the assertion “This sentence is 100 words long,” by discussing not only what it asserts, but also what it displays – which in this case is that that sentence is, in fact, false, because that sentence is actually only six words long. When an assertion displays one thing, and claims something that contradicts this, the thing it displays is generally true, and the speaker is generally a liar. When this pattern occurs time after time in a particular work, the author of that work is a liar, to an almost mathematical certainty. This analysis has been, not a physical microscope, such as Zacharias Jansen invented in 1595, but rather a logical microscope, which exposes the logical details and interrelationships (instead of the physical details and interrelationships) within the letter; and this logical magnification enables the reader truthfully to understand Galatians, at last, after 2,000 years of Paul’s success in his hoax. These additional details are not the “deeper layer of meanings” such as scholars derive via piling opinions on top of opinions, but instead are an authentically deeper level of meanings, which only an authentic logical analysis of the best evidence can and does display. Instead of preserving interpretive problems via piling opinions on top of opinions, as scholars do, the aim of any science is to solve interpretive problems, so as to achieve understanding, not just needless confusions which help prop up mere faith. Whereas scholarship maximizes confusion, science minimizes confusion, and this is done via solving problems (instead of via preserving problems, as scholars do). The purpose here has been to solve problems concerning the start of Christianity.

Moreover, the strength of our logical microscope was even higher on the climax, Galatians 2:11-21, where Paul’s mere 365 words describing this event that created Christianity were magnified by means of 18,751 words of text here analyzing it, a 51× logical magnification, which likewise didn’t entail citing opinions, only facts. By 51× logical amplification of Paul’s sparse description of this event, we described with reliable accuracy much important detail in human history’s most important single event.

What’s especially astounding in this case is the massive amount of evidence, all of it consistent, that Paul left to us – from his own (and/or scribe’s) pen, no less. He actually convicted himself, far beyond any reasonable doubt; but only modern legal/forensic methodology is able to penetrate below the surface-level of his letters and thus expose his guilt, in what is and has been, in historical retrospect, by far the most successful and longest-lasting fraud in all of human history. To science, it’s an open-and-shut case; but to faith, it’s simply non-existent, because a person of faith believes whatever he wants to believe (in accord with psychologists’ findings regarding “confirmation bias” or “motivated reasoning”), and because (as a religious person) what he wants to believe has nothing at all to do with what is. The gulf between science and faith is epistemological, a gulf separating opposite epistemologies.⁷³ Faith will always protect Paul and perpetuate his hoax; but, finally, a scientific approach is possible and is now available, and its findings display Paul’s guilt via cascades of evidence, whose quality is of the highest.

Buried in Galatians is Paul’s confession, and even more than that (because not all confessions are true), is actually Paul’s proof of all significant details of his hoax. What Galatians displays is vastly more – and vastly more credible – than what Galatians asserts. But the assertions in inferior evidence (such as the Gospels, Acts, etc.) are even less credible than what Galatians asserts, and the next scientific challenge is to probe here into those other documents, likewise in a scientific way, by exposing what they display, not merely what they assert.

NOTE

A certain scholar wrote me after reading up through this point (the end of Chapter 3 ), and said that he disagreed with my view that “Paul refused to circumcise his followers, because he knew that he’d lose them if he did, and because he knew that he’d get few if any new followers if he did.” His view was instead that “Paul refused to circumcise his followers, because he believed that God wanted to save as many Gentiles as possible in the end time that was at hand.” I responded:

“Your interpretation (which is consistent with standard Christian views, which have been shaped by Paul’s intentions) fails to explain the things that my text explains, including the internal contradictions within Paul’s writings, and also the internal contradictions within (as well as the contradictions between) the Gospels (which will be discussed in the following chapters). In other words: your interpretation fails the legal/forensic standard of offering a theory of the case which explains (or is consistent with) all of the evidence, even including any contradictions that exist or may exist within the evidence, both internally, and also between the various exhibits.

“In other words: your theory of the case fails.

“Furthermore: your theory presumes (or takes as an assumption) the viewpoint Paul is asserting; your theory doesn’t even deal with the possibility that Paul was lying.

“Rather than analyzing Paul’s views, you are simply taking on those views as your own, as Christians do because their views were actually shaped by Paul’s deceits and inventions. You’ve paraphrased Paul, rather than analyzed him. This is no way to legal/forensically analyze evidence: The mere assumption, that people are speaking and writing with the intention to inform instead of with the intention to manipulate, has to be dropped, because such an assumption turns an ‘investigation’ into a really low-order sales-contest between attorneys who win or lose only on the basis of their skill as deceivers and totally disregarding (if not distorting) what the evidence shows, rather than into a real search to find the truth of what actually went on (such as legal/forensic rules are intended to enforce). The assumption that a person is telling the truth is like the assumption that a person is lying: it’s unacceptable, because whether or not a person is telling the truth or lying has to be determined as a conclusion from the evidence, not asserted as an assumption. Taking it as an assumption discredits one’s conclusions.

“Unsupported assumptions are not acceptable, and your interpretation is an unsupported assumption, which, on top of that, is proven false because Paul contradicted himself whenever convenient for him to do so. Without a doubt, Paul, when provided with a choice either to inform, or else to persuade by manipulating (outright lying, or else evasion), chose manipulation, and he even virtually admitted doing so when he said 1 Corinthians 9:20-27. Paul tried to defend himself against that same charge when he said Romans 3:4-8. However, his statement there doesn’t indicate that he wasn’t a liar; only that he was considered to be a liar to such a pronounced extent that he was driven to deny it. Whether or not he was a manipulator is to be determined from the evidence, but this cannot be done simply by assuming either the truthfulness or else the deceptiveness of a given writer. Whether or not Paul was a liar is to be determined not by his confession (1 Corinthians 9:20-27) but by his numerous internal contradictions, all of which served his purposes as I have described, but not as in your theory. Your theory doesn’t even attempt to explain his numerous self-contradictions; it’s not a theory of the case, much less a good or likely-true theory of the case.

“Or, at least, that’s what I think, unless you provide me with reasons for your view, not just state the view with the unspoken assumption that it explains all of the evidence including the internal contradictions within the evidence.

“I remain to be persuaded by you that your interpretation is a theory of the case, and that it is moreover the likeliest-true theory of the case. What you have presented here is simply a paraphrase of Paul. If there were no internal contradictions within Paul, and also no contradictions between Paul and what he was referring to (such as between Galatians 2:16 and Genesis 17:14), then it would be possible for a mere paraphrase of Paul to constitute a theory of the case (an interpretation of Paul that’s worthy of being considered by jurors). But that’s obviously not the situation here.

“So, please tell me what your argument is.”

He responded: “I do not deny the deceitful elements in Paul’s argumentation. … You are right in claiming that a theory should explain all of the evidence. The problem is what a scholar decides to put in the center. In the case of Paul taken up in your work the problem is whether he was cheating his converts or not. … [My question of you is:] What kind of liar is Paul? Is he like a man selling used cars, knowing that they are in bad condition, or is he more like a man courting a woman, trying always to show his best side and hide his weaknesses? In other words, is he himself involved in his lie, part of the lie itself, or is he just trying to make profit out of his lie?”

I replied: “He was like most liars: He lied in order to succeed.

“Up until Peter and the other ‘agents from James’ visited him in the event recounted in Galatians 2:11-21, he might not have had to lie in any fundamental way in order to succeed. (As I said, ‘Paul’s deceit started small, but it became very big.’) Three years before that incident, he wrote 2 Corinthians 12:1-7, and admitted that he didn’t know whether the Holy Ghost’s appearance to him on the Damascus road in about the year 33 had been real or only imaginary. But after the event Paul recounted in Galatians 2:11-21, he could no longer admit this doubt, and instead he said in 1 Corinthians 15:14, ‘If Christ was not resurrected, then we have nothing to preach.’ None of Paul’s accounts of his experience of the Resurrection except 2 Corinthians 12:1-7 was written prior to the event he recounted in Galatians 2:11-21, and this is why only 2 Corinthians 12:1-7 admits that maybe he hadn’t really encountered Jesus, not even Jesus’s ghost. I think that 1 Corinthians 9:20-27 accurately admits what kind of liar Paul was. However, he covers it over, there, with phrases about how it was just different ways of living, depending on circumstances – but this device, vagueness, was employed merely to present himself or his case in a less clear and less unattractive light, because he knew that followers are not attracted if you tell them outright ‘Say whatever you need to say in order to win.’

“I look at the most successful politicians today, and at the most successful financiers and other top businesspeople of today – certainly this is so in the United States, where the sales people at mortgage brokerages were told to say whatever they needed to say in order to win the sale – and those top people seem to me to be basically like Paul was, except that Paul (after the year 49) worked for far higher stakes: not just his career, but the religious future of the world. Paul, then, was more ambitious, and also more successful, than anyone else in history. And he had to be extraordinarily cunning in order to be able to win. But otherwise, he was quite normal.

“In Galatians 2:2, Paul said that he refused to lose life’s race; he was determined to be a winner. In 1 Corinthians 9:24-27, he said that he was determined to win at all costs, and he made clear that he was proud of this and recommended that his followers be like himself in this regard.

“Do you think that you now understand what kind of liar he was?”

His response merely paraphrased Paul: He said that Paul’s objective was to save souls. “Paul’s rejection of the Torah in his Gentile mission was due to his apocalypticism and his Christ mysticism. … I think that his yearning for success was subordinated to these motifs. I think you have a point here, but I would not set aside everything else that we have in Paul’s letters in order to make him a liar.” To support this view, he denied that 2 Corinthians 12:1-7 was about Paul’s conversion-experience of Jesus’s ghost. He said that there was no way to know what it referred to, other than that “It is one of his visions and revelations of the Lord (Jesus).”

The chief Pauline purpose was the replacement of circumcision by baptism as the religion’s entrance-ritual, so as to free Paul and his followers from having to expel most of their “converts,” and to enable them to win substantial numbers of future converts.

For this reason, Mark starts right out with the story of Jesus’s baptism by John the Baptist. Jesus’s own circumcision as a Jewish infant can be taken for granted, and was by Mark’s readers during his own time, but it is irrelevant to Mark’s story, and furthermore it emphasizes Jesus’s being a Jew, and is thus suppressed – not mentioned. Mark’s Jesus is the mythological Christian one, whose assumed Christianity started with his baptism, in accord with Paul’s own central purpose of changing the initiation-ritual. Consequently, the fact that Mark OPENS with the CHRISTIANIZATION-RITUAL⁷⁵ is itself extremely significant in displaying the propagandist’s agenda. Subsequently, in 10:38-9, “Jesus” asserts that his disciples will be baptized like himself. This further cements baptism as the faith’s initiation-ritual.

Another Pauline purpose – though actually a LESSER one (despite scholars presuming otherwise) – was the affirmation of Paul’s rationalization for this abolition of circumcision as the faith’s initiation-ritual: Paul’s rationalization, of course, was the cancellation of the Jewish covenant or “the Law,” and the covenant’s replacement by Paul’s own manufactured “gospel of Christ,” salvation by pure faith-and-grace instead of by obedience to God’s laws or commandments. This affirmation by “Jesus” is found in Mark 8:35, 9:23, 9:47 and 10:17-21. 16:16 was added by a later writer, and repeats the affirmation. Passage 2:6-7 presents as Jesus’s first enemies “some teachers of the Law,” so as to suggest that Paul’s enemies had also been Jesus’s own foes. The second appearance of Jesus’s enemies occurs in 2:24; this time, his opponents are identified as “Pharisees” who assert that what Jesus is doing is “against our Law.” The incident ends in 3:6, in which verse these same Pharisees go to Herod’s people to plot Jesus’s death. Then, in 3:22, “some teachers of the Law” declare Jesus to “have the devil in him!” This charge is repeated by them in 3:30. Again in 7:1-15, “some Pharisees and teachers of the Law” condemn him and he reciprocates. 7:21-23 directly implies Paul’s own point that the cause of evil is lack of faith, lack of what’s “inside a person,” or else the wrong faith inside a person, rather than any lack of obedience to the Law. 9:19 presents “Jesus” explicitly asserting the importance of faith by accusing the Jewish crowd, “How unbelieving you people are! How long must I put up with you?” 11:18 has “the chief priests and the teachers of the Law ... looking for some way to kill Jesus.” 14:1 repeats the charge. These verses could very possibly have been concocted on the basis of Paul’s own earlier-written Galatians 6:12, if not 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16.

As part of this second purpose, Mark even presents his “Jesus” as asserting, in 7:14-19, that Judaism’s food laws, the kosher laws, are invalid: that no food is sinful to eat, because only what comes out of a person can be sinful, what goes into a person cannot even possibly be sinful. This extends from Paul’s repeated injunction that what’s important is what’s inside a person, not what’s outside. Especially interesting here is that this “Jesus” isn’t saying that the circumcision law is invalid: such words weren’t placed into his mouth, for two reasons: First: Everyone in Mark’s time knew that Jesus would never have said that Judaism’s signature law was invalid. Anyone whom any Jews considered might possibly be the mashiach would never have said such a thing, because that would have stopped the aspiring mashiach’s chances cold. Second, Paul’s followers had already been instructed, by Paul (1 Corinthians 8-10), that the kosher laws should be followed whenever dining with a law-observant Jew. This “Jesus” was simply reiterating that God didn’t demand such observance – that it was only a practical matter, just as Paul had said (though by using a different argument). Mark was fully consistent with Paul’s supersessionism.

Similarly, 10:9 asserts that God’s command in Deuteronomy 24:1, permitting a man to divorce his wife, is nullified by a command from “Jesus” saying “What God has joined together cannot be broken apart by mankind.” This alleged statement from Jesus is exceptional in its being essentially duplicated by something Paul alleged Jesus to have said: 1 Corinthians 7:10-11 asserts, similarly, that Jesus had commanded prohibition of all divorces. Consequently, since Paul’s is the most authoritative evidence that exists upon the subject of earliest Christianity and of the people who had known the living Jesus, this alleged statement from Jesus is more likely authentic than are Jesus-statements that were alleged only in the Gospels by Paul’s followers. Still, however, the confidence-level here is low, because this statement that Paul attributes to Jesus is consistent with Paul’s agenda against James, of separating Jesus from Judaism. If this alleged Jesus-statement is authentic, it would provide additional depth to James’s predicament: James’s brother Jesus, in that case, wasn’t unambiguously clear in strictly supporting Judaism. To this tiny extent, we cannot know whether Paul’s coup d’état against James was 100% traitorous against Jesus. It’s possible that Jesus was a less than fully strict Jew, even though a respected rabbi. What’s certain is that Jesus was never anything but a Jew. In any event, Mark 10:9 reinforces Paul here.

However, if Jesus actually did assert that the same restriction against a wife’s divorcing her husband applied also in the opposite direction, and restricted a man from divorcing his wife, then Jesus wasn’t actually subtracting from Jewish Law, but adding to it – applying it to men, and not only to women. So, he still wouldn’t have been inclined in Paul’s direction, but, in fact, in the opposite direction: stricter even than the Torah.

A third Pauline purpose was the Deification of Jesus as Christ – the extension of the Jewish messiah-concept beyond its authentically Jewish, purely political, base as the Scripturally foretold Davidic restorer of Israeli independence, so that Jesus became instead a supernatural Godly being, worshipped in direct violation of the first three of the Ten Commandments. This Pauline agenda is promoted in the following: 13:26 states that Jesus “will appear in the clouds with great power and glory, and will send the angels to the four corners of the earth.” 13:31 has “Jesus” saying, “heaven and earth will pass away, but my words won’t.” 14:61-2 has “Jesus” affirming that he is Messiah, Son of God, and Son of Man, who will soon be “seated at the right side of the Almighty and coming with the clouds of heaven,” thereby transposing an allegorical non-Torah (i.e., non-Pentateuch), and therefore non-authoritative, Jewish scriptural verse, Psalms 110, into being a literal and core authoritative Scriptural commitment of this entirely new, Christian, faith. Furthermore, Jesus is variously called “Son of God” (1:1, 3:11, 5:7, 9:7, 14:61, 15:39); “Son of Man” (14:62) synonymously with that “Son of Man” as a god who possesses the power to deliver a general forgiveness for an individual’s sins (2:5-12), “Son of Man” who is “Lord even of the Sabbath (2:28), “Son of Man” who will come in “the glory of his Father with the holy angels”; and, in 9:4-9, simultaneously, both the God-anointed “Son of God” and “Son of Man,” in a sense that EVEN the Jewish prophets Moses and Elijah failed to attain. It’s important to reiterate, in this context, that Jews did not WORSHIP their prophets such as Moses; the first three of the Ten Commandments forbade that. In 4:38-41, “Jesus” commands the wind and the waves to become still, and they immediately comply. Also, in 5:19, “Jesus” performs a miracle and then says to the beneficiary, “tell your family how much the Lord has done for you.” In 6:52 and 8:21, Jesus’s disciples fail to grasp the true significance of Jesus’s miracles, the implication being that they fail to recognize his Godly powers.

A fourth Pauline purpose was the fraudulent portrayal of the Deicide-charge against “the Jews,” instead of against “the Romans” whose favor, for his new religion, Paul and his followers hoped ultimately to win. This goal was embodied in 10:33-4, 11:18, 14:55, and 15:13. The original for it was Paul’s own 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 (which will be our subject in Chapter 7 ). Paul also promoted this smear in Galatians 6:12, and (as was discussed in fn. 25 [page 32], the last of the three footnotes to our discussion of Galatians 1:14) in 1 Corinthians 11:23.

A fifth Pauline purpose was the denigration of Jesus’s authentic apostles, since those people were Paul’s own enemies after the circa-50 CE split. Even Peter was rebuked as “Satan” in 8:33. In 7:17-19, Jesus rebukes his disciples as being just as overly respectful of the Law, and as insufficiently respecting of faith, as are other Jews. 10:41-45 presents Jesus rebuking his disciples for seeking to have rank and status among themselves, perhaps the intended implication being that a later “follower,” perhaps EVEN one such as Paul who never MET the living Jesus, might, in fact, become their SUPERIOR in the eyes of God. (Also, this recapitulates such Pauline passages as Galatians 2:6&9, which played down the importance of the group’s leaders.) 14:27-31 presents Jesus predicting that all of his actual disciples will “run away and leave me.” Paul had already vaguely alleged in Galatians 6:12 that the disciples of Jesus in Jerusalem were the individuals guilty of the Crucifixion, and this was as far as Paul was able safely to go, during his early era, to identify the specific “Jews” in 1 Thessalonians 2:15 he alleged to have killed Jesus. Mark picked up on this by claiming, in 14:27-31&66-72, that “all of the disciples” refused to speak up for Jesus at trial, and that Peter particularly refused. (James wasn’t mentioned there, because Paul’s followers wrote him entirely out of their “histories” of the disciples’ group.) Mark, in his later era, went yet further, in 14:10-11, picking up on Paul’s insinuation in 1 Corinthians 11:23 that some unnamed person had “betrayed” (= “handed over”) Jesus, by Mark’s adding specifically that Judas had “betrayed” (= “handed over”) Jesus to the chief priests. And (as the footnote to our discussion of Galatians 1:14, which was just referred to, had mentioned) Paul used there – and Mark then copied from him – the term that in their time had two meanings (“handed over” and “betrayed”) and which scholars subsequently translated predominantly as “betrayed” (thus transforming Judas into the now-legendary archetypal traitor). This was another of Paul’s tricks, similar to his using “ekklesia” instead of “sunagoge” or “threskeia”; and it was similarly copied by all of the Gospel-writers, and then spread about by scholars. (However, the evidence is overwhelming that Paul himself actually was traitorous to Jesus. Though there is no evidence that Judas was traitorous to Jesus, Paul certainly was: not merely “a” traitor to Jesus, but the ultimate traitor, in all of history, for his turning the very name and identity of “Jesus” into a mighty weapon against Jesus’s religion – against both Jesus’s fundamental belief as a Jew, and also against Jesus’s Jewish people for whom Jesus had courageously sacrificed his life.)

A sixth Pauline purpose was the condemnation of Jesus’s birth-family, since they actually led the apostles, and since Jesus appointed his brother James (Paul’s chief enemy) to be his successor. This objective was directly advanced by 3:31-5 and 6:4. Furthermore, both 10:29-30 and 13:12-13 suggest that the disowning of one’s birth-family can be justifiable in the service of Jesus. 12:35-7 has Jesus actually denying that biological descent from King David is a prerequisite to becoming the Jewish mashiach. This implication separates Jesus from even the prophetic ancestral foundations of his own asserted mission, and was evidently so extreme that both Matthew and Luke explicitly denied what Mark had here merely implied, and instead they directly asserted that Jesus had biologically descended from King David.

A seventh Pauline purpose was the implication that Peter, not James, was designated by Jesus to be the leading disciple. This implication was embodied in 8:29 and 14:29-31. It was reinforced by placing Peter first in the sequence of three – Peter, James, and John – each time that the three were mentioned together, in 5:37, 9:2, 13:3, and 14:33. (In Jewish scriptures, the Old Testament, the routine was to mention the highest-status person first in any list.) On this basis, the writer of Matthew subsequently made Peter’s primacy explicit in Matthew 16:18. However, Mark was written too early for any such explicit statement of that to be credible; when Mark was written, explicit assertion that Peter instead of James led the group would have been too widely recognized as fraudulent.

An eighth Pauline purpose, in line with Paul’s own Romans 13:1-7, though less blatant than that, was the affirmation of Roman Imperial authority that’s indicated in Mark’s verse 12:17, alleging that Jesus instructed Jews to pay their taxes to Rome, and, less directly, granting the Emperor the authority to make the laws generally for Jews. This line in Mark, 12:17, “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s,” wasn’t merely copied in Matthew 22:21 and in Luke 20:25, but it was also one of the most important of all the concessions to the Roman Emperor which Paul’s followers made in their “historical” accounts of their mythological “Christ.” Although Paul’s followers, in this line, didn’t include all of the concessions to the Emperor that Paul had made in Romans 13:1-7 (especially, Paul’s followers didn’t assert here that the Emperor was God’s appointed agent to make and to enforce the laws), those followers did make the central concession that Rome demanded, and that Judaism was constitutionally opposed to accepting – these men granted Rome the authority to determine what was the constitution or basic Law which was binding upon Jews.

This laid the foundation for constitutional democracies ultimately to emerge (the American Revolution, etc.), because it separated the moral realm from the legal realm, and made whatever the ruler dictated to be law, into an automatic surrogate for God’s will, without reference to any Scriptural commandments (or laws) whatsoever. Jews couldn’t do that. On 4 September 1931, the Council of the League of Nations, and later the United Nations, required that Jews accept equal rights for religious and other minorities in order to control Israel, and so this demand was accepted, but Jews avoided explicit institutionalization of it: they avoided violation of the Torah, by avoiding to write an Israeli constitution, which either would have complied with the Torah as the ultimate constitution of Israel, and been discriminatory, or else civil war among Jews would have resulted, with conservatives demanding a constitution subordinate to the Torah as the real and sectarian constitution, and with liberals demanding a non-Jewish and secular constitution. Since Jews had been a persecuted religious minority everywhere, they embraced minority rights in modern Israel’s early phase, though the Torah might prohibit such equality. But in the years after independence, Israel increasingly came into conflict with the UN for violations of its commitments to equality. Muslims in the occupied territories of Israel are especially violated in their rights guaranteed under international law. And Muslim-majority nations similarly run into huge democratic-constitutional problems, because the Islamic faith – like the Jewish faith – claims that any law which violates Scripture is morally invalid. Paul’s breaking the law-God bond didn’t create democracy, but it created the possibility for democracy to emerge in a religious culture. This was Paul’s only positive contribution, and it resulted not from good intention, but from his need to accommodate future Emperors. It’s the basis for constitutional democracies anywhere in the world – even in majority-non-Christian countries – because majority-Christian countries created the League of Nations, the UN, and all of modernity. Furthermore, theocratic faiths, such as Judaism and Islam, are intrinsically hostile toward democracy. Paul freed his followers from that dictatorial-theocratic commitment.

A ninth Pauline purpose was to assert the Resurrection, because otherwise Paul’s sole connection to Jesus wouldn’t even exist. Apparently, Paul’s assertion that he had met the risen Jesus was such an extraordinary claim, in its own time, so that others of Jesus’s followers at the same time weren’t making similar allegations, inasmuch as the earliest manuscripts of the first-written Gospel, Mark, didn’t include it. The ending, 16:9-20, wasn’t included until later manuscripts of Mark, when none of the founders were still alive to be able to contradict it. If the people who had known Jesus during his life had been saying that they’d seen Jesus after his death, then presumably this ending to the earliest-written Gospel would have been included in the original version; but it wasn’t. And, therefore, the addition of that passage served an important Pauline purpose. (Since the other Gospels were written later than the original Mark, at a time when all of the founders were already long-since dead, they included the Resurrection. The addition of the Resurrection to Mark occurred much later than the other Gospels, to which the Resurrection was an intrinsic part.)

A tenth Pauline purpose (based upon such passages as 1 Thessalonians 4:15-5:3), was to quote Jesus as predicting imminent end times, as in Mark 13:7-37. Paul was trying to scare people to convert to his new religion; if they didn’t convert quickly enough to Paul’s Christianity, Jesus might return and consign them to hell even before they die. Mark even borrowed some of Paul’s imagery: Whereas 1 Thessalonians 5:3 says that the end “will come as suddenly as the pains that a woman experiences in child-birth, and no one will escape” being judged when it comes, Mark 13:8 quotes “Jesus” as saying, “These things are like the first pains in childbirth.” This “Jesus” closes (13:36-37): “If he comes suddenly, you mustn’t be caught sleeping. So, I say to you what I say to all: Watch out!” Mark merely amplified upon Paul’s “Jesus,” by writing the words of Paul’s “Christ.”

For these ten reasons, Mark cannot be seen as a Jewish document, but only as a Christian – that is to say, Pauline – one. Even though Mark is probably the first-written of the canonical Gospels (and I would place Luke as probably second, and Matthew as third), it must have been written after the destruction of the Jewish Temple that occurred in 70 CE, inasmuch as 13:1-2 refers to this event. Many scholars, unaccountably, don’t consider this to be evidence of a post-70 compositional date, but, apparently, prefer, instead, to believe in the existence of supernatural powers of prophecy, and to attribute here such supernatural powers to Jesus as Christ. Even more oddly, some of the very same scholars who implicitly reason this way, nonetheless attribute the similar passages in Luke (21:5-6), and/or in Matthew (24:1-2) to their authors HAVING written AFTER the destruction of Jerusalem. Importantly, Jesus in this passage is quoted as speaking of that destruction of Jerusalem and massacre of Jews in a FAVORABLE light, as being God’s retribution, even though it was ACTUALLY Rome’s retribution against the Jewish revolt; and this passage, which pits Jesus against the Jews, thus reinforces yet again, and very strongly, Paul’s own Romans 13:1-7. By implication, scholars who accept the supernatural interpretation of Mark 13:1-2 are thereby historicizing Jesus’s there-alleged RESPECT for Rome’s Emperor as being an agent of God, and Jesus’s there-alleged HATRED of the multitude of Jews whom that Emperor’s forces slaughtered on that occasion.

Mark embodies RICHLY the Pauline agenda.

Of course, Matthew, being largely COPIED from Mark,⁷⁶ absorbed much of Mark’s Pauline agenda. However, many scholars deny Matthew’s Paulinism specifically on account of Matthew 5:17-20 & 19:17, explicit affirmation of “the Law” despite Paul’s having strongly condemned salvation-through-obedience-to-the-Law. That common scholarly view ignores the critical fact, which is that Paul’s denial of the Law was MERELY a pretext to replace circumcision with baptism as his faith’s initiation-ritual.

Matthew 28:19 replaces circumcision with baptism, and therefore affirms Paul’s necessary point in this matter. And, of course, Jesus, according to Matthew’s account, just as in Mark’s, became baptized at the very start of his mission, and one might say that in that earlier portion of Matthew’s account, 3:13-5, baptism is implicitly being introduced as superseding circumcision – which Jesus must have undergone as an infant, but Matthew, again like Mark, suppresses that fact. 3:15 even goes so far as to present Jesus as saying that baptism is required by God – a purely Paulist Christian notion, not Jewish at all, and therefore emphatically at odds with the scholarly opinion that Matthew is non-Pauline. Even though some Jewish sects had come to require baptism of Gentile converts or “proselytes” as an additional entrance-requirement beyond circumcision, even those sects didn’t accept baptism as a SUBSTITUTE for circumcision; and the very idea that a born Jew such as Jesus needed to be baptized is a gross violation of Judaism. Matthew in 3:15 is clearly Pauline, not Jewish at all.

What scholars fail to acknowledge about Matthew largely embellishing upon Mark, is that by its doing so, Matthew was embellishing upon the Pauline religion, rather than building upon the Jewish one. Scholars seem to be the only people not to have noticed this obvious – and obviously important – fact. The historically concerned lay public acknowledges it readily: Matthew is clearly Christian and NOT Jewish.

As I noted, the first thing that should be recognized about the affirmation of the Law in Matthew 5:17-20 & 19:17 is that the only reason Paul had renounced the Law was to enable replacement of circumcision by baptism, which, as I’ve mentioned, Matthew – following Mark – does, in fact, do. However, I shall now add, also, a second, subsidiary, factor to both Paul’s and Matthew’s motivation here, which might help explain Matthew’s ENDORSEMENT of the Law in this passage:

Matthew, recognizing Mark’s earlier virtual writing-off of Judaism, was clearly trying to RECTIFY Mark’s story-line so as to keep the Christian door open at least a crack to the admission of Christian-believing Jews. Evidently, unlike Mark, Matthew thought that it might still be possible to get the best of BOTH worlds – superseding Judaism, and yet inviting believing Jews to become Christians – and this was in keeping with Paul’s own admonition in 1  Corinthians 9:22-5 and 10:33: “I become all things to all men. ... Just do as I do; I try to please everyone.” Paul also reflected this tactic extensively in Romans, such as in 3:31 and in 9-11, straining to avoid repelling the few Jews in the Roman congregation. In this sense, Matthew is Pauline not only in strategy, but also in his tactics or concept of how to go about achieving it. The reason why Matthew felt FREE in 5:17-20 to accept explicitly Jesus’s being Law-respecting, which Paul didn’t, is that, when Paul was writing, Paul needed to establish a RATIONALIZATION for throwing out the circumcision-commandment, Genesis 17:14, and this rationalization had to avoid explicit mention of Jesus’s respect for the Law (including Genesis 17:14). However, by the time that Matthew was writing, circumcision may already have been, to a large extent, effectively discarded amongst Christians, and so Matthew didn’t face the same demand that Paul did; there were no longer – perhaps after the Roman massacre of Jews in 70 CE – so many Jesus-followers who had been born Jews and who thus even cared about circumcision. It also should be emphasized, in this context, that Paul never explicitly said that Jesus had not been a respecter of the Law. Paul wrote too early for such an explicit statement about Jesus to have been credible to his readers. Consequently, Paul had to imply this without explicitly stating it; and so that’s exactly what he did. But the Gospelists wrote later. Matthew’s inclusion of 5:17-20 reflected, therefore, merely a tactical choice by its writer, a choice to attract Jews if at all possible. This choice was in accord with Paul’s strategic goals; it didn’t contradict those goals. Matthew wrote in a different time and environment, and he applied Paul’s strategy to that changed situation; therefore, his tactics were different.

Furthermore, it’s critically important to recognize that all other Pauline purposes, within Mark, were, indeed, imported into Matthew. Take, for example, very importantly, the Deification of Jesus:

Matthew 28:17-19 says, “When they saw him they worshipped him [which violates the first three of the Ten Commandments], ... and Jesus said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me [placing within Jesus’s own mouth an endorsement of this violation of the first three of the Ten Commandments]. Go, therefore, and convert all nations, baptizing them.”

It couldn’t possibly have been more blatant than that. Matthew here actually ties the core baptismal replacement of circumcision, right into the divineness of Jesus, and thus implicitly into the denial of the first three of the Ten Commandments; and so, too, into the denial of Judaism itself.

This emphasizes the key fact that when Matthew 28:19 replaces circumcision with baptism, this one passage, alone, actually settles the case of Matthew’s being Pauline.

And that confirms what I had said earlier: it is only Matthew’s tactics that were different from Mark’s. Unlike Mark, Matthew thought that it might still be possible to get the best of both worlds, in keeping with Paul’s admonition in 1 Corinthians 9:22-5 and 10:33. Even though Matthew, in 23:31-8 and 27:25, was shifting the “guilt,” for the “Deicide,” from the Romans onto the Jews, he nonetheless still hoped to convert at least some Jews to his new faith, and it’s this conflict of goals that has confused scholars – just as it has historically confused numerous popes who, like Matthew, alternately wanted BOTH to condemn Jews, and to “save” them.

The writer of Matthew was strategically 100% Christian, but he didn’t accept Paul’s and Mark’s tactics 100%, because of the different situation in which he wrote.

As regards the so-called “Great Commission,” Matthew 28:20, Jesus is there quoted as commanding obedience ONLY to himself, NOT to the Jewish covenant. So, this passage isn’t really an affirmation of the Jewish covenant, not even in the compromised sense in which 5:17-20 was. Moreover, in Judaism, according to the First of the Ten Commandments, it’s impermissible for any man to command as God. Judaism was strictly monotheistic. 28:20 therefore contradicts Judaism by saying “I” command, instead of “God” or “The Lord,” or some other reference that’s not first person, commanding. For example, in the Torah, Moses said that the commandments were coming from God, not from Moses himself. The “Great Commission” is clearly alien to Judaism, by violating its First Commandment. And Christians bow down to likenesses of Jesus and to the Cross, which violates the Second Commandment. And they refer to Jesus as if he were God, which violates the Third. Jesus would have been appalled.

Furthermore, even with respect to Matthew’s attempt to welcome any remaining Jews who might possibly still be open to conversion, Matthew 10:34-37 has “Jesus” say: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the world. No, I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. I came to set sons against their fathers, daughters against their mothers, daughters-in-law against their mothers-in-law; a man’s worst enemies will be the members of his own family. Whoever loves his father or mother more than he loves me is not fit to be my disciple; whoever loves his son or daughter more than he loves me is not fit to be my disciple.” One of the Jewish Ten Commandments is “Honor thy father and thy mother.” Consequently, Matthew had “Jesus” speak out of both sides of his mouth about the Law, not very differently than Paul himself did.

Concerning the Gospels Luke and John, there is virtually no scholar who seriously questions their Paulinism – not even scholars who lack the foggiest idea of what Paul was actually saying. Therefore, the Paulinism of those two Gospels won’t be much discussed here, other than to observe simply that, like Matthew, both Luke and John imported Mark’s Paulinism into themselves. John went far beyond Mark in extending some aspects of that Paulinism, such as Paul’s eschatology, and Paul’s concept of “faith” being grounded by John in “the Word,”⁷⁷ but those extensions of Paulinism don’t make John any the LESS Pauline – in fact, to the contrary. Furthermore, John 19:11 places into Jesus’s mouth the gist of Paul’s Romans 13:1. And John 14:6 places into Jesus’s mouth the gist of Paul’s Galatians 2:16.

Moreover, Luke went perhaps the farthest of all Paul’s propagandists in placing Paul’s supersessionism into the mouth of “Jesus.” Jesus is quoted in Luke 16:16, as saying, “The Law which God gave to Moses, and the writings of the prophets, were in effect until John the Baptist, but now and forever there is the good news about the Kingdom of God, and everyone wants it so badly as to force his way into the Kingdom.” The writer here, Paul’s follower Luke, then puts words into Jesus’s mouth to contradict this, so as to appease any Jews who are still in the group: “However, it would be easier to destroy heaven and earth than to destroy the Law.” But is this “Jesus” really saying here that the Law continues as before? Or is he instead saying that arriving at the Kingdom of God (where, supposedly, the Law won’t apply) will be immensely difficult to achieve? Paul’s follower Luke had learned his arts of deception from the master, and so he left his readers guessing which belief “Jesus” held. But then, in line 18, this “Jesus” goes on to say that, “Any man who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and any man who marries a divorcee likewise commits adultery.” This revisits Mark 10:9 reversing Deut. 24:1. Moreover, the Torah condemns a woman’s adultery, but never a man’s. Leviticus 20:1 commands killing both a man’s wife and her paramour when the two have been caught, but this passage, too, criminalizes only a woman’s adultery, not a man’s. The paramour is to be killed only because he used the other man’s property without that man’s permission. That’s a very different situation than what “Jesus” here commands. And so, Luke seems to present a thoroughly supersessionist “Jesus,” in keeping with Paul’s supersessionist agenda. But is that really the case? As was noted in the prior chapter, this “Jesus” is saying that the strict law that pertains to women pertains also to men. The Torah never went so far: this is actually nothing more than adding a law to the covenant – definitely not ending the covenant. This is not Pauline at all.⁷⁸ Evidently, even at the time when Luke wrote, any placement of Paul’s supersessionist agenda into the mouth of “Jesus” would have exposed Luke’s writing to be a fraudulent misrepresentation of Jesus.

Luke slipped up yet again when he wrote, in Acts 1:6, “The apostles asked Jesus, ‘Lord, is this the moment when you will restore the independent nationhood of Israel?’” And this “Jesus” played coy and didn’t answer. He didn’t outright say no, that he wasn’t going to overturn Rome’s reign over Judaea. He didn’t deny that he was soon going to fulfill his followers’ hope in sedition against Rome, by his restoring Israeli sovereignty – the core meaning of “mashiach.” This line in Acts implicitly acknowledges that “Jesus” was accepted by his followers as being seditious, and that Jesus didn’t deny his being seditious, against Rome. Evidently, even as late as Luke wrote, everyone knew that Jesus had been considered seditious, by his followers, and that he had accepted that he was. However, this recognition was implicit, rather than stated explicitly, because the writer of Acts wanted to avoid telling future generations that Jesus had been executed for violating Roman law, rather than for violating Jewish law. Like the other writers of the four Gospels, Luke wanted future generations to be deceived into believing that “the Jews” and not “the Romans” had “killed Jesus.” This lie fulfilled a Pauline agenda, which was necessary in order for future Roman Emperors to be able to accept Christianity.

Even the Gospel that was written the latest, and that is generally considered to be the most anti-Semitic, John, had to acknowledge, in the late period in which it was written, that Jesus was passionately a Jew: John 4:22 quotes its “Jesus” as asserting “[only] we [Jews] know whom we worship, because salvation comes from the Jews.” And, of course, Matthew quoted Jesus as asserting to his disciples (Mat. 10:5-6), “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, ... but go instead to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Again: Paul’s followers could go far in their lies; but, even for them, limits existed on just how far they could afford to go.

It’s interesting to track the different ways in which Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, adapt to their respective situations their water-carrying for Paul. For example, whereas Matthew 16:18 is explicit about Jesus’s appointing Peter as his successor, John 21:17 and Luke 22:32 are close to that, but, by contrast, nothing in the earliest-written, Mark is. Mark could only imply that Jesus preferred Peter above all other disciples, not go beyond that to suggest, in any way, that Jesus had appointed Peter as his successor. Each writer went as far as he could, and relied upon the faith of followers to carry the hoax to the next stage.

Another example of this evolution of the hoax, over time, is the way in which the four canonical Gospels change or modify the respective statements of their “Jesus,” over time, so as to amplify Paul’s theology to the fullest extent that could still be believable to the audiences of each respective time. For example, the earliest-written Gospel, Mark, quotes Jesus, in Mark 12:28-3, as saying that, of all the laws, “The most important one is this: Listen, Israel – the Lord our God is the one and only God. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” The phrase there, “The Lord our God is the one and only God,” is actually the First of the Ten Commandments, and Mark’s “Jesus” was stating it here as being part of the “most important commandment.” This “Jesus,” however, mixed into it an additional command, to “love” this God; and this was actually similar if not identical to the Second of the Ten Commandments, which is “Worship no god but me.” If the “love” within the lexicon of this Markan “Jesus” was supposed to be interpreted as being synonymous with the “worship” within the Second Commandment, then the answer of this “Jesus” was that the “most important commandment” is the combination of the First and the Second of the Ten Commandments. However, when Matthew (in 22:36-38) and Luke (in 10:25-28) copied this statement from Mark’s “Jesus,” they notably left out of it the First of the Ten commandments. It’s not included at all in “the greatest commandment” from either “Jesus.” Apparently, whereas the “Jesus” that was recollected in Mark’s time was widely known to have believed that the First of the Ten Commandments is at least part of “the most important commandment,” the memory and recollection of Jesus had become sufficiently vague decades later when Matthew and Luke were writing, so that those men could drop it entirely from their “Jesus.” The reason for their dropping it is obvious: Attributing the First of the Ten Commandments to Jesus was a cardinal violation of Paul’s Trinitarian agenda, since Paul had said (in such places as Galatians 2:16-21) that all of the commandments became invalid following the Resurrection, and that the unitarian Jewish God was now replaced by the Trinitarian Father-Son-Ghost God. The way that Matthew dealt with the then-undeniable reality of the actual Jewish Jesus was via the “Great Commission” (as theologians call it), which is the last three lines of Matthew (28:18-20), alleged to have been spoken by the Resurrected “Jesus,” or the Holy Ghost. Hundreds of years later, the churchman who added to Mark its soon-to-be-canonized ending (16:9-20) included, copied from Matthew, an expanded “Great Commission,” in Mark 16:15-18. This is how a Jesus whom virtually everyone when Mark wrote knew to have been a committed Jew, transmogrified during the coming decades and even centuries into the Christian (i.e., Pauline) Christ. It was a hoax that took centuries to complete.

What’s critically important to a legal/forensic analysis of text, or to a legal/forensic hermeneutics, is always to understand the purposes for which the writer actually wrote. Scholarship seeks to interpret only what a given writer meant to say. If a writer meant to hide something, rather than to say it, scholars go along with that. Scholars don’t want to get involved with issues of intent (especially if that intent is to deceive) – it’s “too controversial,” especially with classical texts, and most especially with religious Scriptures. However, legal/forensic hermeneutics is based upon an understanding that to explicate a text’s meaning without a simultaneous explication of its writer’s purposes (its objectives), will fail, unless the writer’s purposes happen to be 100% HONEST. Scholarship is tolerable if it studies ONLY honest texts. It assumes the honesty of all classical texts (especially of religious ones, such as the NT), even if it sometimes questions the truthfulness and authenticity of those texts. But, just as not all classical texts are necessarily truthful, they also aren’t necessarily honest. And that’s where scholarly hermeneutics falls flat onto its face. And that’s why many scholars wrongly view Matthew as non-Pauline.

Consequently, all of the canonical Gospel accounts of “Jesus” reflect Paul and not Jesus. Any “historical” account of the start of Christianity that asserts, or even suggests, Jesus started Christianity, is false. It’s not really history at all; it’s just a myth about a myth – a piling of misrepresentations onto the existing Christian myth. This doesn’t mean, however, that scholars who assert that Jesus never existed are correct, because their accounts are also false (as has likewise been demonstrated in this work). Jesus did exist, and Christianity is the religion that was created by enemies of the Jewish sect he started, enemies who never met him: Paul and his followers. Christianity is the religion that was created by these enemies of Jesus. Today’s Christians are followers of Paul, not of Jesus. They are people who are fooled by Paul, and who teach each other a religion that they mistakenly think was created by Jesus, who would actually be furious against Paul if Jesus were to come back today and see what has happened. Instead of such a “Jesus” (as Christians have been taught to expect, based upon the Pauline-derived lie called “The Great Commission”) being delighted to see that billions of people worship him in violation of the first three of the Ten Commandments, the real Jesus would be shocked and enraged to find that it is so. And he would especially be beside himself with a raging fury when discovering that the anti-Judaic and anti-Semitic religion that Paul created has thereby become the world’s largest and most successful religion.

As was stated concerning Mark, the fourth Pauline purpose in that earliest Gospel was to blame the Jews instead of the Romans for killing Jesus. This Deicidal charge became the basis for anti-Semitism. The most direct Pauline expression of it – and of hatred against Jews in the broadest sense – is 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16; and defenders of Paul don’t like this passage, because the Christian Holocaust against Jews made anti-Semitism no longer fashionable among Christians. (Prior to the Holocaust, the authenticity of 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 was challenged little if at all.⁷⁹) Thus, in the wake of the Holocaust, the authenticity of this Pauline passage is widely challenged by scholars.

Predominant scholarly opinion holds that even the canonical Gospels are not THEMSELVES anti-Semitic, despite passages such as John 8:44 and Matthew 23:31-38, which assert Jews to be descended from Satan. But, more strongly still, scholars hold virtually UNIVERSALLY that the writings by PAUL are NOT anti-Semitic, because acknowledging that 1 Thessalonians 2:14-15 is authentic places anti-Semitism in the earliest-written of all Christian documents. This mainstream post-Holocaust “New Perspective” on Paul goes so far as to maintain that Paul wasn’t even anti-Jewish. However, 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 says “the Jews ... killed the Lord Jesus, ... displease God and are enemies of all men,” and exults in their misfortune; and this is so blatantly anti-Semitic that the only way scholars have found to prop up such a lie as that Paul wasn’t anti-Semitic, has been for them to assert this passage to have been an interpolation or later addition by some anonymous editor. Unfortunately, there is no reason to consider that to be true.

The letter itself, 1 Thessalonians, it should be noted here, is generally regarded as the earliest-written authentic Christian document, dated at around 49-50 CE, probably within about a year after the council in Jerusalem and that meeting’s immediately following event, as recounted in Galatians 2. Indeed, some scholars even date Galatians itself as early as 50, but still after 1 Thessalonians.

If 1 Thessalonians was, in fact, written in the immediate AFTERMATH of Paul’s passionate encounter retold in Galatians 2:11-16, then 1 Thessalonians should be expected to reflect Paul’s most uninhibited anti-Judaic, perhaps even anti-Semitic, sentiments; and this would especially be the case if the Thessalonian congregations, who were his immediate intended audience, contained few or no born Jews, since there would then have been a substantially reduced (if any) incentive for Paul to have written to these congregations in language moderated so as to AVOID offending Jews. In that case, the sole restraining influence upon Paul’s expression of his hatred of Judaism would have been that, until just a short while PRIOR to his writing this letter, Paul would have been speaking of Judaism in ONLY a FAVORABLE light, inasmuch as he had, until that time, been converting people to, or selling people on, the Jesus-SECT OF JUDAISM. In other words, when Paul was writing this letter, he knew that its recipients, until this time, had always thought of him as being PRO-Jewish, and, indeed, as still being himself a Jew. After all, Paul had only just NOW become a FORMER Jew; the event retold in Galatians 2:11-16 had happened not long before Paul wrote 1 Thessalonians. This letter would have been, perhaps, even Paul’s “coming out” as a FORMER Jew, if he had been sufficiently honest to have done such a thing. But yet, at the same time, the recipients of this letter, as all Gentiles, might nonetheless have had little, if anything, emotionally invested of themselves, personally, in a specifically JEWISH identity, especially if these “converts” were relatively new, as would most likely have been the case if there were no born Jews in the Thessalonian congregations.

And, to judge by the letter itself, all of this seems to have been the case. The letter does, indeed, condemn Jews (in lines 2:15-16) but NOT Judaism. For example, it instructs its readers, in 4:1-12, to OBEY the Law, so that (4:12) “you will win the respect of those who are not believers.” It even says – referring presumably to Paul’s own immediately prior teachings to these people – (4:1) “you have learned from us how you should live in order to please God,” right before it paraphrases some of the covenant-commandments. That statement, viewed within the broader context of the subsequent Pauline epistles, is simply stunning; it is Paul’s virtual admission, at this crucial time in his life, that, PRIOR to the event which created Christianity, Paul had himself been teaching thorough respect for the Jewish covenant, EVEN soteriologically/eschatologically; i.e., even as being a valid path to achieve salvation in heaven, rather than damnation in hell. Paul couldn’t very well now DENY to these people, at so early a time, that he had indeed been teaching this. He always had done so. Only SUBSEQUENTLY was that to change.

Therefore, this was NOT really an anti-Judaic letter at all; it was not against Judaism PER SE. Paul’s hatred had to take a DIFFERENT form here – specifically, an ANTI-SEMITIC form, in 2:15-16. The problem for Paul in this passage was NOT Judaism – not, at least, when he was addressing this particular audience at this particular time. The problem here was, in fact, not at all “the Law,” meaning the covenant, Judaism itself. Instead, the problem in this instance was “the Jews” (2:14), as (2:15) Deicidists, enemies of all mankind, and the people who are condemned by God. The passage was, indeed, ANTI-SEMITIC, not MERELY anti-Judaic. Scholars who are (especially after the Holocaust) personally invested in the denial that there is anything INHERENTLY anti-Semitic in Christianity ITSELF, have therefore wanted to NEGATE this passage’s authenticity, and so, as was mentioned, they have asserted that Paul didn’t write it; that it “must” have been added later, by some editor.

Elsewhere in the present work is discussed the scholars’ chief “reason” for this (actually) unsupported assumption: namely, that the punishment of the Jews that Paul relishes in 2:16 “must” have been referring to Rome’s sacking of Jerusalem in 70  CE, which, of course, occurred approximately two decades LATER than the letter itself. It has been previously pointed out here that these scholars have ignored the expulsion that took place of all Jews from Rome by the Emperor Claudius in probably 49 CE (though some historians place it in probably 41 CE), which might have occurred only shortly prior to this very letter, and therefore been most timely to have been referred to in it in that context. Some scholars have replied against this incident, as being Paul’s referent in 2:16, by introducing the culturally crude observation that such an expulsion, of every Jew from the Imperial capital – which we should note occurred, in any case, during the great war between Rome and the Jews, a war Josephus called the biggest war that ever was – was too “inconsequential” an event to have been seen, in its own time, as so mortal a threat to Jews everywhere, such as to have warranted reference by so ominous a phrase as appears at the end of 2:16. As is usual for such scholarly “arguments,” no support has ever been proffered by its proponents, nor have scholars deemed it necessary to provide any, since this fiction props up a myth they find culturally convenient to sustain.

It’s also highly relevant here to note that the Romans 13:1-7 endorsement of the Roman Emperor as being God’s appointed agent on earth punishing evildoers, would support EITHER inference, the 49 CE event or the 70 CE one, as presenting the Emperor’s action as executing God’s will, and so it’s supportive but indeterminate as between the two.

Further deserving of note here is that even IF Paul was NOT referring here to the expulsion of all Jews from the Imperial center that pre-dated, and so presaged, by about twenty years, Rome’s sacking/burning of the Jewish capital city of Jerusalem, this STILL would NOT mean that Paul’s reference here was NECESSARILY to the LATER, 70 CE, event. This passage might THEN have INSTEAD been a reference to some event that went UNRECORDED in all of the few SURVIVING historical documents from and about that era. In other words, scholars’ mere ASSUMPTION that the 70 CE event is what this passage in 1 Thessalonians was referring to, is, in any case, UNFOUNDED.

Another historically recorded event that Paul might possibly have been referring to here was a famine in Judea, which might have occurred in the year 48, and which Josephus referred to in book 20, chapter 2, of Antiquities of the Jews.

Some scholars have asserted that 2:14-16 breaks from and is different from what immediately preceded and immediately followed it, because a prior passage (2:7-12) and the following passage (2:17) both assert Paul’s familial fondness for the Thessalonians, whereas 2:14-16 concerns instead the Jews trying to stop him “from preaching to the Gentiles [who include those Thessalonians] the message that would bring them salvation.” These scholars believe that all of 2:13-16, not just 2:14-16, was a later interpolation. But they simply ignore the structure of the entirety of 2. Chapter 2 opens with 2:1-2, describing Paul’s previous success in holding the congregation together despite the mistreatment, insults, and opposition, he had received from Jews who tried to prevent him from preaching to Gentiles that they didn’t need to be circumcised. This theme is picked up again in 2:14-16. Other portions of 2 present Paul’s personal bonding with the Thessalonians, including the two specifically familial passages. Taken all together, 2 is actually a brilliant unity, presenting Paul’s expressions of gratefulness to God, both for his own success with the Thessalonians, and also for God’s hatred of the Jews who had tried to stop him from that success.

Moreover, both 2:1-2 and 2:14-16 allege persecution of Paul’s followers, and this is a theme that Paul asserts elsewhere, in Galatians 1:8-9, 4:17-20, 5:7, and 6:12-13, as well as in Philippians 3:2. The very same passage, 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16, that is in question here, by the scholars who allege Paul didn’t write it, is actually typical of Paul in its alleging persecution by the proponents of circumcision.

The only other “argument” for the INAUTHENTICITY of 2:14-16 has been that this passage employs a number of Greek words that aren’t used (or that aren’t often used) elsewhere amongst the seven generally-regarded-as-authentic letters (including this letter) by Paul. However, this argument, of the occurrence of such “hapaxes” in this particular passage, has been based upon statistically faulty grounds. Every writing, by every writer, naturally tends to contain a few new or unusual words, especially if the subject-matter is new or unusual for that given writer. This passage is the only one in which Paul deals with this specific subject-matter, of Jews’ alleged evilness; consequently, it contains some terms not found, or not frequently found, elsewhere in his writings. And that fact has NOTHING to do with the passage’s authenticity or lack thereof.

Furthermore, by sheer RANDOMNESS , such “hapaxes” will sometimes naturally occur more, within certain clumps or “passages,” than they do in the “average” passage from the same writer. Every letter, and other writing, contains such clumps that have unusually many new words. Yet it’s not normal to conclude from this that EACH such clump must NECESSARILY indicate the passage itself to be a later addition, by a different writer. Indeed, that’s only very RARELY assumed.

Furthermore, it’s entirely FALSE to treat, as “a passage,” for such a hapax-analysis, what is actually, and obviously, only an essential PART of what is, in fact, a much LONGER PASSAGE. Yet this is precisely what such scholars are doing here: they’re treating 2:14-16 as if it were a later addition, which should therefore be expunged from the text, even though 2:14-16 is, as we’ve noted earlier, merely the CLIMAX of 2:2-16, an obviously longer passage. To expunge 2:14-16 would decapitate that entire longer passage. Consequently, a fair hapax-analysis of 2:14-16 would have to compare the hapax-ratio of the ACTUAL entire passage, 2:2-16, as against the Pauline norm, and this kind of hapax-analysis indicates no hapax-abnormality, even DESPITE the anomalous subject-matter encountered in its 2:14-16 segment.

Given the shoddiness of all arguments for 2:14-16 being inauthentic, a few scholars have proposed instead that Paul meant here to condemn not all Jews, but only “all Jews who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and who persecuted us.” However, if Paul wasn’t intending here to promote the collective condemnation of Jews, then why did he end this passage by exulting, about the expulsion of all Jews from Rome: “And now God’s wrath has at last come down on them!”? That’s clearly a damnation of all Jews, and not only of “all Jews who killed the Lord Jesus.” Paul there introduced, for the first time in any surviving writing, the collective damnation and Deicide-guilt of all Jews – anti-Semitism. Consequently, scholars stress their arguments that 2:14-16 is inauthentic; since this argument is more complicated, it’s better for befuddling gulls.

Scholars who have argued against the authenticity of this passage, 2:14-16, have had only one REAL reason for doing so: they simply don’t LIKE this passage. It’s full of obvious hatred against Jews. But, when one really understands Paul’s epistles, one recognizes that, so too was he. If scholars weren’t clergymen wearing a different hat, and clergymen weren’t scholars wearing a different hat, then the authenticity of 2:14-16 wouldn’t even be a scholarly issue at all, but would be accepted just as is the authenticity of 1 Thessalonians itself.

Indeed, the real irony of this whole matter is that, after the split, Paul evidently felt free to express to Gentile audiences his anti-Semitism even BEFORE he felt free to express to them his anti-Judaism. This makes sense within our context: He had converted his gulls to Judaism, and so wasn’t free to condemn it, but he could – and did – condemn his enemies, who were born-Jews: the circumcised. That’s why he promulgated anti-Semitism before he promulgated (as in Philippians 3:8) anti-Judaism. The reality, then, is that, instead of anti-Judaism leading to anti-Semitism in Christianity – such as scholars commonly but falsely suppose – anti-Semitism actually PRECEDED anti-Judaism, at least in the writings of Paul, who invented anti-Semitism, as part of his invention of Christianity. Paul’s writings reflected his goal of catering to power, and, consequently, his broad socio-political calculations. The fact that Paul had previously been selling (a sect of) Judaism, represented, for him, a bind/predicament, which temporarily restrained his expressions of anti-Judaism. But, by the time of Philippians, later in his career, Paul had no compunctions in calling Judaism ITSELF (3:8) even “mere garbage.” The original Greek term, ZEMIA, is also variously translatable as trash, or as damaged goods, or EVEN as “excrement” – the term that, oddly, one scholarly FAN of Paul’s (Lloyd Gaston) chose in his exegesis of that passage, arguing that Paul was pro-Judaic. But, however translated, Paul’s reference here reflected clearly (except to scholars) his utter CONTEMPT for Judaism.

Also late in his career, in Romans, which was addressed to a congregation that contained some Jews, Paul had a difficult balancing-act to perform, which caused that letter to stand out for Paul’s sophistical distinction between Israelites (whom he favored, since he considered himself to be one: one of God’s people) and Jews (whom he, of course, now hated: proponents or preachers of Judaism). In Romans 3:28, and also in 3:20, he clearly expressed his supersessionist, anti-Judaic message; yet in 3:31 and 2:6 he directly denied it, while giving no argument for the contradiction. Indeed, in 3:30, he had already just previously denied this denial, when he said that for both Jew and Gentile there is only one path toward personal salvation, which is the Christian path, of pure faith, that’s stated in 3:28 and in 3:20. He had even explained why the Jewish pathway, of total obedience to the Law, is, in his view, inevitably doomed to failure: in 3:23, he said that everyone violates the Law, and so to try to please God in that way (the Jewish way) can never succeed. Yet elsewhere in Romans, likewise in order to placate the Jews in the Roman congregation, Paul stated, in its chapters 9-11, that God retains his love for all Israelites. So, for Paul, God loves Israelites, the nationality of the Kingdom of God; but yet in Philippians 3:2-8, Judaism itself, the religion or belief-system, is called trash; and, in 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16, Jews themselves, the people, are asserted to be damned by God. Paul clearly hated both Judaism and Jews; but in order to placate Jewish believers in Jesus as the Messiah (and he needed those Jews desperately, for providing credibility to his con), Paul nominally paid honor to their nation of Israel. He wouldn’t explicitly tell Jews, however, that the new people of Israel were Paul’s own Christians, no longer Jews, since Jews (as in Romans 3:23-26 & 28, and Galatians 2:16) were doomed to perdition so long as they failed to convert to his own, new, Christian faith. But, it seems, from Acts 21:21 forward, that Jews in Paul’s era knew anyway; they weren’t so dumb; they understood Paul quite well, even if scholars today choose not to.

Paul invented anti-Semitism, and he did it systematically. His followers, who wrote the Gospel accounts of “Christ” and of his allegedly Jewish Deicide, merely PERFECTED it, by placing this sentiment, PAUL’S sentiment, into the mouth of “Christ.” This was perhaps their most barbaric violation of the historical Jesus. However, their having been followers of Paul – the enemy of Jesus/James – made this barbarism inevitable. The original deception was by Paul.

One might reasonably ask: Why don’t scholars know that the four canonical Gospel accounts of “Jesus” reinforce Paul’s agenda? This question’s answer, however, is ridiculously simple: In order to know that the Gospels embody Paul’s agenda, one must first know what Paul’s agenda was. Scholars haven’t known what Paul’s agenda was, because they didn’t want to. All their interpretive (or “hermeneutical”) verbiage thus ignored this key issue – these people were determined to believe Paul’s honesty; not Paul’s creation of Christianity. (Scholarship is “motivated reasoning”; for scholars, the findings are more important than the methodology – not the converse, as for a scientist.) Scholars have even employed extreme measures in order to avoid making sense of Paul’s writings: they’ve used measures such as assuming that the issue in Galatians 2:11-21 was the food laws instead of the circumcision law, and such as assuming that Paul was there accusing his opponents of “Judaizing” – even though no evidence exists for these assumptions, and the evidence is consistently contrary to them. Scholars haven’t been merely passive in misinterpreting Paul; they’ve been active and imaginative at the task, whenever they needed to be, in order for them to be able to present Paul as an honest person. They’ve served as Paul’s legal-defense team. And that’s why no scholar has pointed out that the Gospel accounts of “Jesus” reflect Paul’s agenda: scholars didn’t want to know what Paul’s agenda actually was.

This is how scholars enabled themselves to perpetuate the myth (actually the fraud) that the canonical Gospels reflect Jesus’s agenda. To know that the Gospels reflect Paul’s agenda – instead of Jesus’s – is to know that Christianity is a hoax; and that’s the last thing scholars want to understand.

After all, it’s not as if scholars were unaware that Paul wrote first. So, why didn’t they explore the possibility that the authors of the Gospels, etc., were his followers?

As was noted, scholars – wittingly or not – have served as Paul’s defense attorneys; but a court of law in a democracy needs a judge, and jurors, and a prosecutor, as well. That’s the difference between what scholars do, and what courts in democratic nations do: taking testimony at face-value, as scholars do; versus cross-examining it (etc.), as courts do. These differences in methodology produce the differences in findings.

The present book sets forth the prosecution case against Paul, and – unlike the defense team’s case – the prosecution case doesn’t require faith, because all of the evidence supports it: an entirely scientific theory of the case, one that’s constructed from the best evidence on each and every matter, convicts Paul conclusively, even beyond the strictest legal standard, of “beyond a reasonable doubt.” You, the reader, are the juror, and only you can make the decision for yourself: No judge, prosecutor, or defense attorney, can make it. It is entirely up to you, whether you are a person of science, or a person of faith.

Scholarship has been an extension of the church. But (just as happened with Galileo in physics, and then with Darwin in biology) history and the other social “sciences” require something better than that, in order to become authentic sciences.

Perhaps if professors of earliest Christian history at accredited colleges and universities were barred from ever serving in a church’s pay, and preachers in church-run institutions were barred from ever teaching earliest Christian history outside of a church-financed setting, there would be a difference between preachers and teachers, but that’s not the case now: These two fields are essentially one, and calling its practitioners “historians” is to insult the historical profession. Any historian who accepts such people as being historians has a very low opinion of his field, and accepts its being corrupt, not an authentic science.

The “revolving door,” between government regulatory agencies and the companies they regulate, is widely recognized to be corrupting, and this is the reason legislation exists in democracies to minimize that “revolving door,” laws to require (for example) that no one who regulates a firm may be hired by that firm for some set period of time after government employment. No such restrictions exist in academia. They should.

Corruption doesn’t just distort science; it blocks science. It doesn’t block technology (even dictatorships can promote technology), but it prevents the prerequisite for science, which is unbiased (or “fair”) interpretation of evidence.

For example, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s monitoring of the safety of America’s drugs was so unreliable, and so poor, that on 22 November 2004, the editors of JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, publicly gave up on the FDA; and, The New York Times headlined the following day, “A Medical Journal Calls for a New Watchdog on Drugs.” Denise Grady reported: “Arguing that it was unreasonable to expect the same agency that approves drugs to ‘also be committed to actively seek evidence to prove itself wrong,’ the editors … recommended that the nation consider establishing an ‘independent drug safety board’ to track the safety of drugs.” This was a tactful way of saying that the FDA operated as an arm of the pharmaceutical manufacturers, not of the public. The field was corrupt.

Scientists do not accept corruption of their field.

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Scholars necessarily do, because they’d otherwise jeopardize their careers. Thus, for example, the Summer 2010 Wilson Quarterly headlined “Atheists Anonymous” (playing on the Alcoholics Anonymous theme), and summarized and linked to “Preachers Who Are Not Believers,” by Daniel C. Dennett and Linda LaScola, in the March 2010 Evolutionary Psychology. This study interviewed, in depth, five clergy who anonymously admitted they didn’t believe in what they preached. One said that he “and his wife are raising their son to recognize that Bible stories are not factual. ‘And so when we talk to him about Bible stories, we remind him constantly that these are just stories; ... think about them in no different way than you would any other stories.’” Another minister said that his son had asked, “‘Dad, do you really believe?’ Before I could think, I said, ‘Son, I don’t.’” But still he wouldn’t tell his wife this, because “It’s going to turn her life upside-down. ... She’s a very dedicated Christian, very devout.” All of the interviewees were afraid to let their congregation know their beliefs. For example, one of them, “When asked his opinion of why ministers do not pass on their knowledge of Christian history to parishioners, ... said: ‘... They don’t want to lose donations. ... They don’t want to lose members.’” For a minister to say that his religion’s Scripture is false would be for him to jeopardize his career. Another said, “I see it as play acting. ... I know how to pray publicly. I can lead singing. I love singing. ... But I see it as taking on the role and performing.” The financial motive to deceive was clear. This man admitted bluntly: “I need the job. ... I do feel kind of hypocritical. It used to be the word ‘hypocritical’ was like a sin. I don’t hold that view anymore, ... that there’s absolute truths.” He seemed basically a post-modernist, someone for whom the lack of “absolute truths” (whatever that is supposed to mean) justified a contempt for truth itself, or at least an unconcern for truthfulness, an unconcern for honesty. In some cases, there was a contempt for the parishioners, who need to believe the Bible. One minister said, “As long as ... you’re talking about God and Jesus and the Bible, that’s what they want to hear.” Another said, “The whole heaven thing makes no sense, either. Why would I want to walk on streets of gold?” Yet another minister explained his situation as purely a matter of personal necessity: “Financially, I don’t have a choice, [because leaving the ministry] ... would cause a huge financial burden on me. I mean, how would I continue to make my house payment and support my family?” He also noted, “Secondly, ... I have zero friends outside the church.”

Some preachers are also professors, who teach future preachers. As has been noted here, the same people often go back and forth between these “two” professions. The same basic demands, for them to endorse orthodoxy, are working on them, in “both” capacities. No field of science, especially not an advanced field such as physics, can have such orthodoxy, or else it’s not really a field of science but is instead functioning more as a field of faith.

Faith is a “virtue” in religion, because every religion is based on faith. Faith is what the salespeople of religion are selling. But it’s the supreme epistemological vice in science.

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And this is how it comes to be that scholars – just like the billions of Paul’s fooled people – cite the words and actions of the “Jesus” that were written by Paul’s followers, Jesus’s enemies. Scholars cite this, even when they don’t believe it themselves. These people cite, as the words and actions of “Jesus,” the words and actions those enemies of Jesus concocted, and lied, nearly two thousand years ago, attributing to Jesus.

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What would Jesus (the real one) think of that?

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And what would a committed scientist (someone who applies science instead of faith as the basis for beliefs) think of it?

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The only way to understand faith is by means of science. The only way to understand anything is by means of science.