Ignorant outsider declares himself the authority on Christianity
When a man named Paul (also known as Saul) saw that Stephen had been killed, he approved. With the high priest’s permission, Paul started beating, imprisoning, and killing all the Christians he could find.
But then, while Paul was going from Jerusalem to Damascus, Jesus blinded him with a flash of light from heaven, and then sent a Christian from Damascus to un-blind him. Paul had a change of heart, but he just couldn’t make himself stop sinning.
Paul spent several days with the Christians in Damascus, during which he didn’t learn anything about Jesus from them. Then he suddenly started proclaiming that Jesus was the son of God, which confused everyone.
The Jews in Damascus wanted to kill Paul now that he was promoting Christianity. But he escaped back to Jerusalem, and tried to join the Christians there. At first they didn’t believe that their enemy was really a Christian now, but someone convinced them.
But then the Jews there tried to kill him too. So Paul went away and started preaching his own foolish message of Christianity to the world. People thought he was insane. Paul preached only to foreigners, who weren’t familiar with Jesus and so had no preconceived ideas of what he was actually like. Paul and his companions suggested that they might harm people who didn’t do what he thought God wanted. And the terrified foreigners complied.
Three years later, Paul went to Jerusalem briefly and met the Christians there for the first time. The apostle Peter (also known as Simon or Cephas) also started preaching Christianity to Gentiles, which the other Christians of Judea thought was wrong. They thought only Jews could be Christians. But Peter said he had had a dream that God told him to eat animals that were forbidden by God’s law. Therefore, it must be okay for Gentiles to be Christians.
Paul briefly questions the reliability of his knowledge about Jesus
Over a decade later, Paul heard that Christians from Judea were teaching Gentiles that they couldn’t be saved unless they were circumcised. Paul, having never actually met Jesus nor learned the original church’s doctrine, had been teaching something quite different. He had taught his followers that Jesus had made all those useless old Jewish laws obsolete. Especially circumcision.
So Paul decided to go to Jerusalem again, to talk with the apostles and make sure he was getting the message right. He found that, contrary to what he thought the spirit of Jesus had revealed to him, the original Christian church believed that all Christians had to follow all the Jewish laws, including circumcision. Peter, who tended to say foolish things, discussed the matter with Paul, who he thought was awfully hard to understand. They seemed to come to an agreement, but that didn’t last long.
The apostles sent Paul out with a letter telling the Gentile Christians that they only had to follow a few Jewish laws. But Paul really didn’t think even Jews needed to follow even those laws. He sometimes pretended to think people were still under the law though, in order to be more convincing to people who thought that way.
The original Christians attempt to debunk Paul’s misinformation
Then Jesus’s brother James convinced Peter and the rest of the Jewish Christian church and even Paul’s companion Barnabas that Gentile Christians did indeed have to live like Jews. Paul opposed them and called them hypocrites.
The Jewish Christian church in Jerusalem sent out their own missionaries to the foreign churches Paul had founded, teaching them their version of Christianity, which Paul disagreed with. They taught Paul’s followers that they had to obey the Jewish laws, including circumcision. They pointed out that they were Jesus’s own chosen apostles, and Paul was not. Some members of Paul’s churches started turning away from Paul and his comrade Apollos, and started following Peter.
So Paul started writing his followers defensive letters, proclaiming himself to be an apostle. He insulted and demonized the “other” apostles, insisting that they weren’t any better than him, and he didn’t need their opinions.
Paul’s insistence on lawlessness gets him arrested
Later, Paul decided to go to Jerusalem one more time and try to make peace with the original church by offering them a bunch of money that his churches had donated. After all that conflict, Paul wasn’t confident that the apostles would accept him. He expected it to go so badly that he would never be able to return and see his followers again. And he was right.
The apostles presumably did reject his peace offering. Otherwise, their acceptance would surely have been mentioned in the book of Acts, which always tries to make it look like Paul was on much better terms with the original church than his letters show he really was.
When Paul arrived in Jerusalem, the apostles told him they had heard that he was teaching even Jewish Christians that they didn’t need to obey the Jewish law, which was not part of the “agreement” the apostles had made with Paul. They challenged him to disprove those rumors by publicly joining some of their followers in their Jewish rituals. Paul, who had a habit of changing his conduct to try to please everyone, agreed to go with them.
So the apostles sent him off to the temple, into the hands of the thousands of zealously lawful Jews who had heard about his heretical teachings. The outraged Jews seized Paul, beat him, and had him arrested by the Roman authorities.
All the Jews thought Paul should be killed for all the trouble he had caused. But the Romans weren’t sure what Paul was being accused of. At first, the Romans mistook him for an Egyptian terrorist leader. Paul didn’t seem to know what he was being accused of either. He seemed to think it was about his belief that people could be resurrected, even though that wasn’t an uncommon belief among the Jews.
The Roman soldiers eventually figured out that the problem the Jews had with Paul had to do with their own religious law, and he hadn’t done anything against the Roman law. So they told Felix, the Roman governor of Judea, that Paul had done nothing that would justify imprisoning or killing him. But Felix imprisoned him anyway, just to make the Jews happy.
Two years later, Felix was succeeded by Festus, who thought Paul was innocent and should be set free. But instead of accepting Festus’s help, Paul insisted on having his case decided by Emperor Nero, who hated Christians. So Paul was sent to Nero, who had him beheaded.
But then most of the Jewish Christians were killed in the First Jewish-Roman War, leaving only Paul’s Gentile churches intact.1 So Paul’s corrupted version of Christianity endured, and eventually became the biggest religion in the world.
The end.
The moral of the story
Don’t try to teach something without learning it first.