04-16-2018, 07:03 AM
You may encounter various brands of Christian belief that make Paul out to be a complete outlier. One of my friends is a total weirdo who hates Paul and hunted down a printed Bible that excluded Paul's letters. It should be no surprise that this is rooted in the Judaizers. They hated Paul as the ultimate traitor, because he had intimate knowledge about the nasty legalism of the Pharisees, and then did so much to expose them. Worst of all, Paul was a former Pharisee who dared take the gospel to Gentiles, of all things.
None of the Apostles faced as much hostility from the Jewish leadership as Paul did. You can read between the lines and see how the Judaizers followed him everywhere, actively keeping track of him so they could go along behind and corrupt everyone who heard his preaching. This hostility never went away. Long after Paul died, there was a concerted effort to disparage his work and his motives.
Throughout Church History we can see moments when this flared up. It gave rise to a whole area of academic study that tried to characterize Paul's theology as somehow different from everyone else's. We have such fancy terms as "Pauline doctrine" and "Petrine theory" and so forth, striving to distinguish the preaching of the Apostles based on their extant letters. They try to create the image of rivalry and dispute between them. Such academic pursuit makes a mountain out of a molehill, so that the continuity between Old Testament, Jesus, and the various Apostles, is completely lost. (See 2 Peter 3:15-16)
Thus, today we have any number of little cults based on hating Paul's letters. Any excuse you can imagine is used; a big one is the LGBT community suggesting that Paul was the only one who preached against homosexuality. They flatly deny that Jesus taught the Old Testament. This is aligned politically with the Zionists, for obvious reasons.
None of the Apostles faced as much hostility from the Jewish leadership as Paul did. You can read between the lines and see how the Judaizers followed him everywhere, actively keeping track of him so they could go along behind and corrupt everyone who heard his preaching. This hostility never went away. Long after Paul died, there was a concerted effort to disparage his work and his motives.
Throughout Church History we can see moments when this flared up. It gave rise to a whole area of academic study that tried to characterize Paul's theology as somehow different from everyone else's. We have such fancy terms as "Pauline doctrine" and "Petrine theory" and so forth, striving to distinguish the preaching of the Apostles based on their extant letters. They try to create the image of rivalry and dispute between them. Such academic pursuit makes a mountain out of a molehill, so that the continuity between Old Testament, Jesus, and the various Apostles, is completely lost. (See 2 Peter 3:15-16)
Thus, today we have any number of little cults based on hating Paul's letters. Any excuse you can imagine is used; a big one is the LGBT community suggesting that Paul was the only one who preached against homosexuality. They flatly deny that Jesus taught the Old Testament. This is aligned politically with the Zionists, for obvious reasons.
