Monday School: The Worst Christian Ever

Monday? Well, then – guess I might as well post another Monday School.

The ongoing “Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday!”

Today’s Lesson: Who Was The Worst Christian Ever?

Well, let me say right off the bat that I’m not sure what the answer to that question might be. It would take a lot of research and thought just to figure out which of the men discussed in E.R. Chamberlin’s The Bad Popes might be considered the worst, let alone who among the hundreds of millions of Christians who have ever lived might exceed even their evil ways.

But let’s open this one for debate. If you have someone you would like to nominate for ‘Worst Christian Ever’, feel free to leave a note stating who you would like to nominate and why. Maybe if we get enough votes, we’ll hold a debate and let readers cast a vote.

As for me, it’s an easy answer. The worst Christian ever should be one of the men who started it all: Paul.

There are lots of reasons for this. Most of them may not seem all that bad in and of themselves, but when you stop and remember that Paul was setting a precedent that lots of other Christians ended up following in the centuries after his death, I think you’ll quickly come to agree with me that his negative influence on the history of the world cannot easily be overestimated.

Consider, first of all, that the Bible would have us believe that he was a persecutor of Christians until he had a vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus, at which point he became such a Christian fanatic that he actually went to Jerusalem and tried to tell the disciples there what Christianity was really all about even though they (unlike Paul) had allegedly met Jesus in the flesh. This teaches a number of very bad lessons: That simple conversion can absolve you of all responsibility for the evils you committed before you converted; that bizarre, visionary experiences can trump the real-world experiences of numerous others; and that it’s appropriate for one person to barge into a pre-existing group and act as a gOd-directed know-it-all. These are three common Christian beliefs and behaviors that I find highly objectionable, and all three can be traced back to Paul.

Add to this list Paul’s apparently superb salesmanship. The drive that took him across a good part of the ancient Roman Empire and the guile which inspired him to remove such blocks to conversion as circumcision and dietary restrictions may have been admirable had he actually been selling something healthy and good, but instead… well, it’s like Karl Rove using his talents to sell war and welfare for the wealthy – i.e., an obscenity. And it’s an obscenity that’s repeated every time a priest or a preacher or a minister gets up in front of a crowd and uses sophistry and charm to convince people to believe that which no rational being ever should.

Perhaps the two worst things about Paul, however, are these: He demonized sex; and he attacked reason itself. The tremendous pain, both private and historic, that have flowed from this is truly incalculable….

If you want to read a lot more about Paul’s impact on modern Christianity, try reading Charles Freeman’s book, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (Vintage: 2005). Freeman spends over 400 pages detailing the wonderful intellectual advances made by ancient Greeks such as Aristotle and how the rise of Christianity first put an end to them, then rolled them back and kept them back for roughly 1000 years. The sad part of this story seems to begin with Paul.

“Paul occupies the dominant position in the early Gentile church, even to the extent of being called by some the founder of Christianity,” Freeman reminds us in the first sentence of the 20-page chapter devoted to my choice for worst Christian. “Unlike Jesus he insisted on a dramatic break with traditional culture, not only his own, but also that of the Greco-Roman world…” (p. 107).

Paul also seems to have demanded a break with all those other Christians who dared contradict him: “‘Let me warn you,’ he tells the Galatians (1:8), ‘that if anyone preaches a version of the Good News different from the one we have already preached to you, whether it be ourselves or an angel from heaven, he is to be condemned’” (p. 113). (“He is desperately afraid of competition,” Freeman quickly explains, rather unnecessarily.) This seems to be the start of two other most unfortunate Christian traits: A tendency towards closed-mindedness (“God said it, I believe it, that settles it”), and a tendency to demonize Christians who disagree as heretics.

The extent of Paul’s condemnation is made plain in 2 Thessalonians 1:7-9 where “it is made clear that those who refuse to accept ‘the Good News of our Lord Jesus Christ’ will be punished for eternity” (p. 119).

Needless to say, this was not a message that highly educated Greeks familiar with the open-minded empiricism of Aristotle were likely to embrace.

“[H]e may have been unsettled by his confrontation with the pagan philosophers in Athens,” Freeman reasonably hypothesizes. “His response was to hit back with highly emotional rhetoric, the only weapon to hand. So for Paul it is not only the [OT] Law that has been superseded by the coming of Christ, it is the concept of rational argument, the core of the Greek intellectual achievement itself.”

Freeman underlines this point in the following long paragraph that immediately follows the above comments: “‘The more they [non-Christians] called themselves philosophers,’ he tells the Romans (1:21-22), ‘the more stupid they grew… they made nonsense out of logic and their minds were darkened.’ In his first letter to the Corinthians (1:25) he writes, ‘The wisdom of the world is foolishness to God.’ There is something of the mystic in Paul’s disregard of logic (and a paradox in the way he uses his considerable rhetorical skills to attack the very intellectual tradition of which rhetoric was a part). This disregard had unfortunate consequences. As Paul’s writings came to be seen as authoritative, it became a mark of the committed Christian to be able to reject rational thought, and even the evidence of empirical experience. Christians would often pride themselves on their lack of education, associating independent philosophical thinking with the sin of pride. Even educated Christians such as Gregory the Great (pope 590-604) followed Paul. Drawing directly on the Corinthian verse quoted above, Gregory commented, ‘The wisdom of the world is concealing the heart with strategems, veiling meaning with verbiage, proving false to be right, and true to be false,’ and, as weshall see, the Greek intellectual tradition was to be increasingly stifled by the churches. So here we have the roots of the conflict between religion and science that still pervades debates on Christianity to this day. By proposing that Christian faith (which exists in the world of muthos [myth]) might contain ‘truths’ superior to those achieved by rational argument (logoi), it was Paul, perhaps unwittingly in that he appears to have known virtually nothing of the Greek philosophical tradition he condemned, who declared the war and prepared the battlefield” (pp. 119-120).

We’ll never know exactly how much was lost because of Paul’s words and attitudes, but it doubtless was considerable. “Paul insisted that Christians must remove statues of gods and goddesses from temples and public places. During Paul’s lifetime Christians would have been unable to desecrate pagan temples without massive retaliation, but by the fourth century Paul’s teachings, supported by Old Testament texts, were used to justify the wholesale destruction of pagan art and architecture” (p. 120).

The current debates in the US over “intelligent design” and stem cell research – as well as the (oh-so-Christian) Bush administration’s contempt for impartial intelligence gathering and members of the “reality-based community” – seem imbued with the same extremely dangerous attitudes of Paul that led to the suppression of knowledge, the embrace of fantasy, and the arrival of those centuries we now know as the Dark Ages….

As for Paul’s unfortunate impact on sex….

“Paul’s strictures and the central place given to sexual ‘sins’ in his theology suggest that the act of sex itself troubled him deeply…. Before Paul sex was not seen to raise major ethical problems…. Most Greeks accepted sexual desire as a natural part of being human…. The body as such was seen as neutral. Paul introduced a very different view…. The idea of the body as a ‘temple’ that can be desecrated by sexual activity has been extraordinarily influential in Christianity, as can be seen in the enormous energy still devoted to debates on sexuality within the churches” (pp. 121-122). (It is important to note at this point that Freeman states in his introduction that the issues of early Christianity that he deals with in his book continue to be dealt with by his wife – a psychotherapist – as she attempts to counsel her clients today.)

The extremely negative impact Paul’s attitudes towards sex had on Augustine, Jerome, Tertullian, and other church fathers – and ultimately Catholics (and many non-Catholics) everywhere – is too well-known to belabor here….

Things wouldn’t have had to evolve this way – and they almost didn’t. Although Christians (and especially the Catholic Church) seem to prefer to present the story of Christianity as both clear and inevitable, Freeman’s book repeatedly reveals just how arbitrary Christian beliefs and attitudes are. Far from being the obvious elements of a perfect wisdom handed down to us by a supreme being, Christian dogmas turn out to be little more than random accidents of history upon close examination.

The fact that Paul’s words endured, let alone triumphed, is one such accident. “While the letter to the Galatians is often seen to be one of Paul’s finest, there is no material evidence of any surviving Galatian Christian community, nor of a Colossian one; the first archeological evidence for Christianity in these areas comes centuries later. It is quite possible therefore that Paul’s communities lapsed” (p. 123). Since Paul (like most early Christians) believed that Jesus’s second coming was imminent, it’s hard to see why he would have even tried to set up enduring communities.

In Freeman’s view, it seems that the Gospel of Matthew was written in part to challenge Paul’s authority by appealing to Jesus. (All the Gospels, it will be recalled, were written long after Paul’s letters – and the Jesus depicted in those Gospels disagrees with Paul again and again, as detailed here.)

Freeman also points out that Irenaeus (the bishop of Lyons who died circa 200) described a Jewish sect known as the Ebionites this way: “They use the Gospel according to Matthew only, and repudiate the apostle Paul, maintaining that he was an apostate from the law.”

So why did Paul’s odd, poorly supported, and perhaps unpopular views triumph? Mainly because the Jerusalem-based Christians who disagreed with him seem to have been virtually wiped out by the Romans as part of their campaign against Jewish rebels. (For more details, see A.N. Wilson’s book Jesus: A Life or the relevant entry I wrote about it.) Just as a nondescript, shrew-like creature during the age of the dinosaurs seems to have ended up surviving and giving rise to our species thanks to the earth’s taking a timely hit from a huge bit of space debris, Paul’s theology seems to have triumphed and survived quite possibly because forces beyond his control ended up driving his bigger, more promising competitors to extinction. I can hardly begin to imagine how much better the world might now be had Paul’s theology been the one to die out instead….

Bottom Line: If I was a contestant on Jeopardy! one day and one of the clues behind the category “Christian Miscreants” was “He was the all-time worst Christian,” I would have buzzed in and confidently said; “Who is Paul?”

Of course, after we hear the sound contestants get after making an incorrect answer, Alex would go on to tell me, “Nope, sorry – we were looking for ‘Who is Adolph Hitler?’”, it would be hard to act surprised.

So how about you?

Who do you think was/is the worst Christian ever?