Simply Jesus or simply Paul?

[gbrooks9 (George Brooks)]

@kyle

Who is more important Paul or Jesus? Doesn’t the Church choose Paul over Jesus? Jesus taught to teach to do every commandment in the Mosaic Law “until heaven and earth are gone” (the word “therefore” in the verse which refers to v. 18) while Paul teaches “we are no longer under the Law” in his letters and was accused of this in Acts 21. [Matt. 5:19cf.18]

@kyle

I used to have “a beef” with Paul for what he did to shape the Primitive Church to the nature of the Pax Romana.

But over time, I came to see that there was an extremism in the early Jewish/Christian communities. For those who challenge that view, it’s quite easy to find almost anywhere in the New Testament:

While the Essenes of the period met under the umbrella notion of “The Way” and in “Assemblies of Heaven” and “Assemblies of God” - - it was the early Church that changed the phrasing to the “Kingdom of Heaven” and the “Kingdom of God”.

Without Paul’s gift for turning the earliest congregations into multi-cultural gatherings (or gatherings open to such diversity), the theme of “kingdom” would have continued to collide with the Imperiium of Rome throughout the centuries.

The irony is that Paul might have been looking for more of a religious culture as seen in the Eastern Orthodox communities … but ended up inspiring the Roman/Latin side of the church into becoming the unbending Kingdom (al la Pappa, the Pope) that Paul could see as a phantom shadow within the early Church!