Jesus of Nazareth was a Cynic. There is no doubt about that at all. And the reason I mention him so often is that he was the only Cynic to have a significant number of disciples. It is precisely because hardly any of his students understood him that makes his example so exciting for us. Not because I could explain or even exemplify cynicism better than Jesus, but because his inability to reach many makes me serene. You may have heard that Jesus was a Cynic, as were many Jewish traveling preachers in his time.
But if we contrast our cynic, the messenger of God, Jesus of Nazareth, with the brand “Lord Jesus Christ, the Crucified”® that the Pharisee Paul created to destroy the evangelical Jesus and his followers, then, indeed, our friend Jesus was the Antichrist, no more and no less than Friedrich Nietzsche.
The most important opponent of Jesus was and still is today Paul, the founder of the Christian® religion. If one imagines the incompatible positions of Paul and Jesus as a wrestling match for the largest following, analogous to the arm wrestling in the picture above, then Paul clearly won. Millions of people today still see “Christ” as their Lord, to whom they pray. And only a vanishingly small minority is willing to learn from Jesus what he desired: to follow him in learning the secrets of a beautiful life.
In this article, I would like to present the contrasts between Paul and Jesus in as condensed a manner as possible, using only a few examples. I hope that in the end the readers will be able to understand as little as I can that Christians can refer to the Gospels and to Paul at the same time. I will also quote passages from the Gospel of Thomas, in the knowledge that this is of course not recognized by the Christian® state churches founded by Paul. But essentially I refer to recognized Bible passages. To address all the important contrasts would fill a book. And I would be happy if I could simply point to such a writing. And frankly, I also do not understand that such a book does not seem to have been written yet. Maybe there is even that? I would be grateful for a hint about it.But now to a few points, which hopefully already make clear enough the incompatibility of Paul’s art product “The Lord Jesus Christ”® with Jesus of Nazareth.
Parrhesia
Parrhesia is the essential single virtue of the Cynics. We are convinced that we are good from our divine nature, that therefore the constant practice of self-realization, founded on self-awareness, is the path to eudaimonia. And this includes lovingly accepting death as something beautiful. The moment we succeed in this, we attain the “Kingdom of God”, as the eternal life here and now, in this beautiful world, not only in the hereafter after death on earth.
Jesus encourages us again and again to love ourselves and to love those who are called as sinners from the mainstream. We should not judge anyone that we are not judged on (understood psychologically)We should not judge anyone lest we ourselves be judged (understood psychologically). We are to live dangerously, to take risks. We are to engage with strangers and foreigners, we are not to worry. Jesus preaches and lives love grounded in his love and trust to God
Paul is a preacher of hate. He is a Pharisee, i.e. he belongs to those who always wanted to trap Jesus as a sinner, to convict him as an outlaw. Paul is trained in rhetoric and his letters show that he also uses this rhetoric without restraint. The art of rhetoric is rejected by cynics, thus also by the cynic Jesus.
The adulteress
Once, when an adulteress is brought before Jesus by Pharisees, Jesus is supposed to tell them what to do with this woman. They hope that he says they should forgive her, let her go, not be so strict, because then he would have openly called for breaking the law. After all, the law required the stoning of an adulteress. After much deliberation, and because the Pharisees would not let go, Jesus finally said let he who is without any fault cast the first stone. With it the Pharisees and the rabble drew the short strew. Because to claim to be without any guilt was considered a sin itself. So they departed. The woman was saved.
Paul, in several letters to his parishes, not only condemns that there would be adultery and other debauchery, such as alcohol abuse, the forbidden cohabitation of a man with his stepmother, homosexuality and so on. Rather, he expresses his anger, that this shameful behavior is not prosecuted by the communities. Such people must be immediately excluded from the congregation of Christians®. The flesh of the sex offender who consorts with his stepmother must be given to Satan, which was probably understood by most to mean that he must be killed. Homosexuals must be killed in any case, sluggards who do not want to work should not be allowed to eat either. Paul does not tolerate wanting to understand here. Paul does not preach forgiveness, but demands brutal punishment of the wrongdoers. He stands in stark contrast to Jesus.
Paul condemns all drinking of alcohol. Jesus himself drank wine all the time. And when once a disciple (in the Gospel of Thomas) calls him his teacher and then slurs something that he does not understand him at all, Jesus laughs and says that he is not his teacher and that the disciple drank too much of the wine Jesus gave him, he should ask his questions the next day.
From Saul to Paul?
Paul persecuted the followers of Jesus before his alleged conversion. He makes no secret of this fact. This is a rhetorical trick that every evangelist preacher I have ever heard uses. How boring and unattractive it would be, if such a televangelist would tell, for example, that he grew up well protected in a wealthy Christian family, was already a Christian as a child and it was clear to everyone that he would make his living as a televangelist as an adult. No. They were all on the wrong track. They had done drugs, were addicted to gambling, were homeless, beat up innocent people, were in jail, etc. Until at some point they had a vision of Jesus, the Lord®, radically changed their lives and as a result were richly blessed by God. Then the listeners get wet eyes and shout their “Hallelujah”.
So also Paul. But Paul is even more blatant. He does not only want to preach, but to found a new religion. Paul does not talk about a “conversion”, but in his case the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ® appeared to him immediately, told him the real gospel and gave him the order to proclaim it among the Gentiles.
While he mostly points out, again just like the evangelists with their always same rhetoric, that the people should not obey him, Paul, but the Lord Jesus Christ®, he also sometimes slips out a mistake. In one letter he calls the gospel his! Gospel. And all others, should they contradict him in any point, are cursed, come from Satan. Even if an angel would come and would contradict his gospel, that would be the untruth.
While the other 12 apostles knew Jesus during his lifetime and 11 of them also claimed that his spirit appeared to them after death, and agreed that only those who actually knew Jesus during their lifetime could be apostles, Paul basically declares himself to be the only true apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ. Because he did not appoint himself as an apostle, like the other 12, but he was appointed by the Lord Jesus Christ personally. And, in case it is not yet clear: of course he is 100% filled with the Lord Jesus Christ. He and only he knows exactly what the Lord demands. He is a slave of the Lord. And the people in his church are, as he is slave of the LORD, his SLAVES. They have to obey him. Everything that belongs to them, of course, belongs to Paul. But, he then always adds, he does not want to come with the sword, he would have the right to demand everything he wants, but he prefers to ask nicely.
Is then the new only true apostle now become a follower of Jesus?
No. In fact, he does not stop persecuting the Jesus followers at all. These were, after all, like Jesus, Jews. And if Paul changed, then not from the persecutor of Christians to the disciple of Jesus. But to an aggressive Anti-Semite. The Jews and of course also the Jewish “Christians” are an obdurate evil people. God has condemned them long ago. They are (because of their circumcision) castrates, eunuchs. The Jews have murdered the Lord Jesus Christ®. They deserve to die. Of course, Paul only lets off such hate speech to Gentile Christians. But there are also mixed congregations. There, of course, the rhetorician is more cautious. Paul rages against the division. And he rages against those who are not part of it. The Romans, he writes to them, are his favorites. He has robbed money from the Greeks, he boasts, in order to give it to the Romans, his favorites. The Greeks are worth hating. They boast so much about their love of wisdom (philosophy). But the Lord Jesus Christ® doesn’t want wise, he wants foolish believers who believe and obey rather than discuss and know better. (That was not an ironic insertion, Paul really said that).
From prayer
In his letters, Paul demands from his “Christians” that they pray constantly. Their whole life should consist of praying and working.
And Jesus?
In the recognized gospels, he recommends that they should not pray as much and tumultuously as the Gentiles. They should pray the Lord’s Prayer. That is enough.
In the Gospel of Thomas, he is even more explicit:
If you pray, you will be condemned!
Gospel of Thomas, 14.
I think I have to explain this briefly. What Jesus is rejecting here as a cynic, that is a prayer in which God is asked for something or also thanked for a benefit. We do not hope and we do not pray that God may do this or that for us. Rather, our short “prayer” is, ” Your will be done”. God is not supposed to act according to us, since He knows better than we do what is right. That may still be understandable.
At the next point, one or the other may want to defect to the other side, to Paul:
How about charity for the poor?
Paul exhorts again and again, as do the state churches today, to give to the poor. And Paul, as well as the state and evangelical churches, may regularly have ulterior motives.
What does Jesus say?
For example, he asks one who wants to become his disciple to give away all his wealth and then follow him. But Cynicism is not about making the poor richer. That would also be absurd. The cynic Jesus knows how difficult it is to become happy as a rich person. Exactly, the thing with the camel and the needle eye. You know.
Cynics live on the trust that we don’t have to worry, but should trust. You know the passage from the Sermon on the Mount about the little birds that get full even though they don’t work? Exactly. So why give alms?
Again, Jesus is clearer in the Gospel of Thomas. He says. You shall not lend money at interest, but only to people who you know will not pay you back.
“And when you give in charity, you will do bad for your spirit”
gospel of Thomas, 14
When Jesus is caught by one of his disciples, Judas, having been kissed and his feet and legs massaged for hours by A rich whore with super-expensive perfume1According to John, it was a pound of genuine nard oil worth 300 denarii, which at that time was the annual wage of a worker, or the equivalent of about $50,000 today., and the latter criticizes him, saying that the money received from the sale of the perfume could better be given to the poor, Jesus replies: “Oh, come on. The poor will still be here tomorrow. But I will be somewhere else tomorrow.” And then he asked his mistress to dry his legs now with her beautiful long hair. Which she did with pleasure: no rights just mights.
Jesus, Paul and the women
You know the stories about Mary Magdalene. Some theologians call her a girl friend of Jesus, a pope once called her a whore and wanted to ban her from the Gospels. The current pope, after all, recently even calls her the apostel of the apostles.
Did you know though, that Mary Magdalene was rich and financed the whole Jesus enterprise? And that at least two other rich women were also among his disciples and made sure there was always enough bread and wine? (Which, by the way, here gives a very plausible explanation for the “miraculous multiplication of bread” at the feeding of the 5000, just as it does for the wine conjured from water with a much better quality then the first one, at the wedding at which Jesus was a guest.) And did you know that among Jesus’ disciples there were actually many women, possibly more than men? And while a disciple of Jesus wondered how to fill the 5,000 unexpected listeners, Paul demands of his congregations that they eat at home before they come to see him.
But let’s stick with the women:
While Jesus talks to them, listens to them and likes to have them around, Paul declares them to be mindless sub-humans. They are to keep silent in the church. If they have questions, they are to ask their husbands at home. And they must wear a headscarf. Otherwise they might as well shear their hair themselves, so that they would save him the work.
And we owe the original sin® (also an invention of Paul by the way) only to a disobedient human being. Well, who do you think? – Wrongly typed. Not Eve. She doesn’t play a role. Women are evil and mindless anyway. No, Adam alone brought us the whole mess, that we now have to live in a world where it would be better not to have been born at all. That is why Paul also recommends men not to marry, not to have children. But if they do, they have to endure their wives for the rest of their lives in this dark world as punishment.
Jesus said, “If your leaders say to you, ‘Look, the imperial rule, the kingdom of God, is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the imperial rule is inside you and outside you. When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty.”
Gospel Of Thomas, 3.
I hope I have now made your irreconcilable contradiction between Paul and Jesus sufficiently clear to you. And again, I don’t understand why I had to do this work at all. The incompatibility of Paul with Jesus is so obvious, everyone should know that. If you are still not convinced, read the gospels yourself on one side and look at Paul’s letters or the hypocritical goings-on of the state churches in the world. Speaking of the state. I just want to put this at last in the already much too long article:
Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s
I’m sure you’re familiar with this passage from the Bible? Once again, Paul’s rhetorical buddies, the Pharisees, cleverly try to trick Jesus. They ask him what he thinks about the obligation to pay taxes to the state. And hope he says something like, “Taxes are theft!” But Jesus has an imperial coin shown to him, with the image of the emperor on it. And then says, shrugging his shoulders:
“Give the emperor what belongs to the emperor, and give God what belongs to God.” In the Gospel of Thomas he adds: “and give me what is mine”. Again a typical cynical remark.
And what is Paul’s position on the state, which the God of the Old Testament had already warned against?
Let everyone owe obedience to the holders of state power. For there is no state authority that does not originate from God; each is instituted by God. Therefore, whoever opposes the authority of the state opposes the order of God, and whoever opposes it will be subject to judgment. … The state power is in the service of God and demands that you do good. But if you do evil, fear! For not without reason does she bear the sword. She is in the service of God and executes judgment on the one who does evil.
Paul, Romans, 13
Paul is, to speak with Nietzsche, the founder of the Christian slave morality. He is, religiously formulated, a servant of Satan. His churches are the churches of Satan, the persecutors of all who, trusting in God, want to follow the Cynic Jesus.
Read on: The Gods Of The Cynics and Get rid of Shame (more about the Original Sin)
- 1According to John, it was a pound of genuine nard oil worth 300 denarii, which at that time was the annual wage of a worker, or the equivalent of about $50,000 today.