mamadrama
The Living Force
I just finished the book, The Death of Religion and the Rebirth of the Spirit by J. Pearce. In it he states (with no source given) that Paul was responsible for the concept that God had sent his own son to earth as a sacrifice to himself on that earth's behalf.
Early cointelpro?Pearce said:In Paul's translation, this new son of God, in a convoluted reversal of Abraham's mind-set, was sent as substitute for that lamb or ram of long ago that apparently didn't quite finish the job...Paul's was a truly revolutionary idea that, like all such ideas, inadvertantly incorporated and eventually became that which it would have replaced or overthrown. Thus, in time, Paul's translation gave us yet another batch of priests feeding on the social body.
The irony of Paul's story is his recognition that we, as a semimad people, are dealling with not just petty political-military-monetary issues of the day but also "principalities and powers." Yet Paul seems to have played into the hands of the very power he moved against and threatened, but such is the nature of revolutions, which always seem to reinstate the conditions around which the original revolt generated.
This attribution to Paul is new to me (though I am admittedly not well researched in this area). I thought I would ask the resident biblical scholars if there is anything to this claim that Paul is responsible for this concept?Pearce said:Thus arose Paul's Christology in which Jesus disappeared and a vaporous heavenly figure formed as the archetypal image of an ethereal otherworld. Toward this image and the afterlife of this otherworld all attention began to center. Like Moses in Jewish antiquity, Paul's Christ was also backed by the Law - the very Law Paul had opposed yet become chief exponent of in new dress. Paul's Law of love supposedly made obsolete all other laws (much as we fight wars that are to end wars)...Paul's new cosmology and its ever burgeoning laws concerned a God in the sky straight out of those familiar and paradoxical Hebrew scriptures - but one with whom humanity could reconnect if they but followed the injunctions and instructions of Paul himself or those of his multiple imitators who followed him. Whatever the intricately interwoven details, his Christ crowded Jesus out of the scene and off the stage. Taking the spotlight in a kind of identity theft, Paul's Christ became Christ-Jesus and took over history.