Follow Jesus or Follow Paul?
The New Testament gives us a choice; either we follow Jesus Christ, or the anti-Christ Paul of Tarsus: Each one demands his followers to accept his teachings:
Be ye followers of me… that ye remember me in all things, and keep the ordinances, as I delivered [them] to you. (1 Corinthians 11:1)
“If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed” (John 8:31)
Amazing, the former preached against the teachings of Jesus, and the latter, (Jesus) teaches that salvation is only attained by following him. According to Deuteronomy 24:16, Ezekiel 18:20-21, and Micah 6:7-8, a man is responsible for his own sin. Jesus rejected the Pauline doctrine of “vicarious atonement”. Compare the two passages below:
And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission. (Hebrews 9:22)
Jesus was teaching his disciples in the outer court of the Temple and one of them said unto him: Master, it is said by the priests that without shedding of blood there is no remission. Can then the blood offering of the law take away sin? And Jesus answered: No blood offering, of beast or bird, or man, can take away sin, for how can the conscience be purged from sin by the shedding of innocent blood? Nay, it will increase the condemnation. (Gospel of the Nazorenes, Lection 33, verses 1-2)
Jesus was circumcised, Paul rejected circumcision:
This [is] my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and thy seed after thee; Every man child among you shall be circumcised. And the uncircumcised man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken my covenant. (Genesis 17:14)
When his son Isaac was eight days old, Abraham circumcised him, as God commanded him. (Genesis 21:4)
And when a stranger shall sojourn with thee, and will keep the passover to the LORD, let all his males be circumcised, and then let him come near and keep it; and he shall be as one that is born in the land: for no uncircumcised person shall eat thereof. (Exodus 12:48)
On the eighth day, when it was time to circumcise him, he was named Jesus, the name the angel had given him before he had been conceived. (Luke 2:21)
And certain men which came down from Judaea taught the brethren, [and said], Except ye be circumcised after the manner of Moses, ye cannot be saved. (Acts 15:1)
Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach [them], the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:19)
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier [matters] of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone. (Matthew 23:23)
The Jewish Law commands the circumcision on the eighth day. The reason why Christians are not circumcised is because they follow Paul. They have broken the covenant of Circumcision according to Jesus himself (5:19)
For in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision; but faith which worketh by love. (Galatians 5:6, KJV)
For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love. (NIV)
The Talmud states the following to those who break the Covenant:
"The one who voids the covenant of Abraham has no portion in the world to come (Avot 3:16).
Christians may not have any “portion in the world to come” because they have totally rejected the Message of Jesus, replacing the Gospel with the Gospel of Paul.
"The Christianity which the nations claim to follow is the religion of Paul, who is admittedly the chief and almost the only theologian that the Church recognizes. Because of his betrayal of the Master's teachings, the vision of true Christianity has been so dimmed that men have been able to defend war and a host of other evils, such as flesh eating and slavery, on the authority of the Bible." (Christ or Paul? Rev. V.A. Holmes-Gore)
"Let the reader contrast the true Christian standard with that of Paul and he will see the terrible betrayal of all that the Master taught.... For the surest way to betray a great Teacher is to misrepresent his message.... That is what Paul and his followers did, and because the Church has followed Paul in his error it has failed lamentably to redeem the world.... The teachings given by the blessed Master Christ, which the disciples John and Peter and James, the brother of the Master, tried in vain to defend and preserve intact were as utterly opposed to the Pauline Gospel as the light is opposed to the darkness." (ibid, Rev. V.A. Holmes Gore)
"True Christianity, which will last forever, comes from the gospel words of Christ not from the epistles of Paul. The writings of Paul have been a danger and a hidden rock, the causes of the principal defects of Christian theology." (Ernest Renan, Saint Paul)
"There is not one word of Pauline Christianity in the characteristic utterances of Jesus.... There has really never been a more monstrous imposition perpetrated than the imposition of Paul's soul upon the soul of Jesus.... It is now easy to understand how the Christianity of Jesus... was suppressed by the police and the Church, while Paulinism overran the whole western civilized world, which was at that time the Roman Empire, and was adopted by it as its official faith. (Androcles and the Lion, George Bernard Shaw)
The Christian missionaries today are preaching the Gospel of Paul, and rejecting the Gospel of Jesus. Paul emphasized that salvation is attained through “faith and grace” which is blatantly opposite of what Jesus taught.
"Paul... did not desire to know Christ.... Paul shows us with what complete indifference the earthly life of Jesus was regarded.... What is the significance for our faith and for our religious life, the fact that the Gospel of Paul is different from the Gospel of Jesus?.... The attitude which Paul himself takes up towards the Gospel of Jesus is that he does not repeat it in the words of Jesus, and does not appeal to its authority.... The fateful thing is that the Greek, the Catholic, and the Protestant theologies all contain the Gospel of Paul in a form which does not continue the Gospel of Jesus, but displaces it." (The Quest for the Historical Jesus, Albert Schweitzer)
“We have already noted that every teaching of Jesus was already in the literature of the day….. Paul, the founder of Christianity, the writer of half the NT, almost never quotes Jesus in his letters and writings." (Professor Smith in his “The World Religions”, p 330)
Saul/Paul had set out initially to subvert Jesus’ teachings. Later he used his new doctrines to undermine the power of the Jewish church as well as the defied Roman Emperor. Paul sought to torpedo Judaism in its calcified form, its narrow interpretation of the Judaic law. Jesus had initiated this process but did not subvert the law. Paul had no such inhibitions; he rejected wholesale many fundamental laws of God. In the attempt Paul succeeded in undermining both the Jewish and Nazarene teachings. He steered Christ’s teachings away from monotheism and from the Jews, (the lost sheep of Israel) and directed these teachings in a corrupted form to Non-Jews…As Jesus had not succeeded during his mission in converting the majority of his Jewish brothers and sister to his divinely inspired interpretations of Judaism, Paul ensured that after Jesus had departed, that Jews would not be temped to follow Jesus’ Teachings. To this end, Paul so adulterated Jesus’ life, purpose, mission and claims to make the new dogma (Paul’s version of Jesus’ teachings) repugnant to the Jews. (Farouk Hosein, Fundamentalism Revisited, Eniath’s Printing Company Trinidad, p. 49)
The Jewish Christians reacted strongly to Paul, they rejected his pagan ideas of the “divinity of Christ”, and they rejected the concept of the “divine sonship” of Jesus, whom they regarded as a Prophet and Messenger.
The Jewish Christians rejected Paul’s version of ‘Christ’, to them the ‘Christ’ was anointed and fully human. Many characters in the Bible were called ‘Christ’ (anointed) but they were never divine ‘god-men’. Paul changed the original meaning of this title to make it conform to the Gentile thinking. The Romans considered their Emperors to be the ‘sons of God’, or personages of the sun. Similarly, the Hindus consider their heroes to be the ‘incarnations’ of God.
“A true Jew would have immediately recognized the teaching of Jesus as a reaffirmation of what Moses had taught. But to many a pagan, it must have seemed new and strange and perhaps a little complicated. Most of the pagans still believed in a multitude of gods who, it was thought, mixed freely with human beings, mated with them, and took part in every sphere of human life. To the common people of Greece, any description of Jesus must have seemed like a description of one of their gods, and they were probably quite ready to accept Jesus in this capacity. There was always room for one more god. However, the actual teaching of Jesus negated all their gods, since it affirmed the Divine Unity”. (Muhammad Ataur-Raheem, Jesus: Prophet of Islam 1992 edition, p. 62)
Paul’s reasoning had two major consequences. It not only resulted in further changes being made to what Jesus had taught, but also prepared the way for completely changing people’s ideas of who Jesus was. He was being transformed from a man to a conception in people’s minds. Divinity had been attributed to Jesus even when he was on earth by some of those who marveled at his words and miracles, and who, mistakenly, considered him to be more than a prophet. Some of his enemies had also spread the rumor that he was the “son of God”, hoping to rouse the orthodox Jew’s anger against him for associating himself with God. Thus, even before he disappeared, there had been a tendency to obscure his true nature and ascribe godhood to Jesus. This imaginary figure of Christ, who apparently had the power to annul what Jesus had previously taught, was clearly no ordinary mortal, and, inevitably, became confused by many with God. Thus, this imaginary figure became an object of worship, and was associated with God. (Muhammad Ataur-Raheem, p. 70)
The great scholar Mawdudi alludes to the deification of Jesus by the “Christians”.
The false tendencies, born of centuries of deviations, ignorance and malpractice, now took another form. Though they accepted their Prophets during their lives and practiced their teachings, after their deaths they introduced their own distorted ideas into their religions. They adopted novel methods of worshipping God; some even took to the worship of their Prophets. They made the Prophets the incarnations of God or the sons of God; some associated their Prophets with God in His Divinity. (Towards Understanding Islam, p. 39)
Jesus taught Salvation comes through Faith and Works, Paul distorted it:
Jesus taught salvation is attained by keeping the commandments, physical prayer, fasting, and observing the Law of Moses. Paul neglected these commands and distorted the Path to Salvation preached by Jesus.
Paul said that “salvation comes through faith and grace” which is exactly what the missionaries are saying today. Let us read the words of Jesus.
Fasting is commanded:
Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting. (Matthew 17:21)
And he said unto them, This kind can come forth by nothing, but by prayer and fasting. (Mark 9:29)
Now in the twenty and fourth day of this month the children of Israel were assembled with fasting, and with sackclothes, and earth upon them. (Nehemiah 9:1)
And in every province, whithersoever the king's commandment and his decree came, [there was] great mourning among the Jews, and fasting, and weeping, and wailing; and many lay in sackcloth and ashes. (Esther 4:3)
But as for me, when they were sick, my clothing [was] sackcloth: I humbled my soul with fasting; and my prayer returned into mine own bosom. (Psalms 35:13)
When I wept, [and chastened] my soul with fasting, that was to my reproach. (Psalms 69:10)
My knees are weak through fasting; and my flesh faileth of fatness. (Psalms 109:24)
Therefore also now, saith the LORD, turn ye [even] to me with all your heart, and with fasting, and with weeping, and with mourning: (Joel 2:12)
Christians do not fast, Muslims fast during the holy month of Ramadan, so they must be considered the true followers of Jesus. The (only) excuse Christians have for not fasting is echoing the teachings of Paul, who discarded these laws altogether!
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