Paul 

Once known as Saul of Tarsus, Paul had a powerful conversion experience after the death of Stephen, the first martyr of Christianity. Fourteen of the 27 books in the New Testament of the Bible have traditionally been attributed to Paul. He founded several Christian communities in Asia Minor and Europe in the 40s and 50s CE.

Paul's Christian church deviated from Jesus' original intention of the kingdom of heaven. The focus shifted from individual spiritual experience to the collective body of believers, and Jesus became the head of the church rather than the elder brother of each believer. This departure undermined Jesus' concept of the divine kingdom within the individual's heart.

Early Christian doctrines were influenced by Philo of Alexandria, Jesus, and Paul. Paul introduced the concept of atonement for sin through blood sacrifice and burdened Christianity unnecessarily. However, Paul did put an end to the doctrines of redemption through human or animal sacrifices by proclaiming Christ as the last and all-sufficient sacrifice, satisfying the divine Judge.

In Philippians Chapter 3, Paul claims to have been “circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless.”

Both the Bible and the Urantia Book record that Saul of Tarsus stood nearby when Stephen yielded up his life as the price of his attack upon the Jewish temple and its traditional practices. When Saul saw how this Greek could die for his faith, there were aroused in his heart those emotions which eventually led him to espouse the cause for which Stephen died.

According to Acts 9:3, Paul was on his way to Damascus intending to persecute followers of “The Way” when “suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him.” Paul was blinded and then heard a voice claiming to be Jesus. In Chapter 9, Paul indicates his traveling companions likewise heard the voice, but later in Chapter 22, he states that they did not.

Following Paul’s visit with Jesus of the Damascus Road, which is not described in the Urantia Book, Paul spent three days blind and did not eat or drink anything until he met a Damascus disciple named Ananias. The Acts of the Apostles then records yet another unconfirmed resurrection appearance wherein “The Lord” ordered Ananias to “Go to the house of Judas on Straight Street and ask for a man from Tarsus named Saul, for he is praying. In a vision he has seen a man named Ananias come and place his hands on him to restore his sight.”

Ananias’s first response was to answer, “I have heard many reports about this man and all the harm he has done to your holy people in Jerusalem. And he has come here with authority from the chief priests to arrest all who call on your name.” But the Lord said to Ananias, “Go! This man is my chosen instrument to proclaim my name to the Gentiles and their kings and to the people of Israel. I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.”

The Acts of the Apostles continues that Ananias placed his hands on Paul, and then something like scales fell from his eyes and he was able to see. He was then baptized and spent several days with the disciples at Damascus.

Each Jewish synagogue tolerated a fringe of gentile believers, "devout" or "God-fearing" men, and it was among this fringe of proselytes that Paul made the bulk of his early converts to Christianity. The Bible records that he at once began to preach in the synagogues that Jesus is the Son of God, and that all those who heard him were astonished and asked, “Isn’t he the man who raised havoc in Jerusalem among those who call on this name? And hasn’t he come here to take them as prisoners to the chief priests?”

Jesus’s apostles had been trained and instructed that the gospel that they should preach was the fatherhood of God and the sonship of man. Following the Master’s resurrection, Peter led off in the mistake of substituting some of the facts associated with the gospel with the gospel message itself (194:0.3). Paul then created a new religion out of this version of the good news.

The gospel of the kingdom is the fact of the fatherhood of God, coupled with the resultant truth of the sonship-brotherhood of men. Christianity, as it developed from that day, is the fact of God as the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, in association with the experience of believer-fellowship with the risen and glorified Christ.

The gospel of the kingdom is founded on the personal religious experience of Jesus of Galilee; Christianity is founded almost exclusively on the personal religious experience of the Apostle Paul. Almost the whole of the New Testament is devoted, not to the portrayal of the significant and inspiring religious life of Jesus, but to a discussion of Paul’s religious experience and to a portrayal of his personal religious convictions.

While the human Jesus was recognized as having a religion, the divine Jesus (Christ) almost overnight became a religion. Paul’s Christianity made sure of the adoration of the divine Christ, but it almost wholly lost sight of the struggling and valiant human Jesus of Galilee. At the time of the writing of the New Testament, the authors not only most profoundly believed in the divinity of the risen Christ, but they also devotedly and sincerely believed in his immediate return to earth to consummate the heavenly kingdom. This strong faith in the Lord's immediate return had much to do with the tendency to omit from the record those references which portrayed the purely human experiences and attributes of the Master. The whole Christian movement tended away from the human picture of Jesus of Nazareth toward the exaltation of the risen Christ, the glorified and soon-returning Lord Jesus Christ.

Jesus founded the religion of personal experience in doing the will of God and serving the human brotherhood; Paul founded a religion in which the glorified Jesus became the object of worship and the brotherhood consisted of fellow believers in the divine Christ.

The Hellenization of Christianity started in earnest on that eventful day when the Apostle Paul stood before the council of the Areopagus in Athens and told the Athenians about “the Unknown God.” There was something strangely alike in Greek philosophy and many of the teachings of Jesus. Most importantly, the Greek mind was willing to borrow new and good ideas even from the Jews, while Paul and his successors were willing but shrewd compromisers. The Urantia Book describes them as theologic traders.

Abner stubbornly resisted all attempts of Paul to remake the teachings of Jesus so as to present less that was objectionable, first to the Jews, then to the Greco-Roman believers in the mysteries.

Although he was wholly sympathetic with Paul in his mission to the gentiles, and though he supported him in his contentions with the church at Jerusalem, he bitterly opposed the version of Jesus’ teachings which Paul elected to preach. In his last years, Abner denounced Paul as the “clever corrupter of the life teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of the living God.”

Luke, the physician of Antioch, was a gentile convert of Paul and he wrote quite a different story of the Master's life than that recorded in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew. He began to follow Paul and learn of the life and teachings of Jesus in 47 CE Luke wrote in the year 82 CE in Achaia. He planned three books dealing with the history of Christ and Christianity but died in 90 CE just before he finished the second of these works, the "Acts of the Apostles."

Luke preserves much of the "grace of the Lord Jesus Christ" in his record as he gathered up these facts from Paul and others. Luke presents the Master as "the friend of publicans and sinners." He did not formulate his many notes into the Gospel until after Paul’s death.

As material for the compilation of his Gospel, Luke first depended upon the story of Jesus' life as Paul had related it to him. Luke's Gospel is, therefore, in some ways the Gospel according to Paul. But Luke had other sources of information. He not only interviewed scores of eyewitnesses to the numerous episodes of Jesus' life which he records, but he also had with him a copy of Mark's Gospel, that is, the first four-fifths, Isador's narrative, and a brief record made in the year 78 CE at Antioch by a believer named Cedes. Luke also had a mutilated and much-edited copy of some notes purported to have been made by the Apostle Andrew.

Paul was a devotee of an ancient cult of renunciation and humiliation, which tolerated marriage only as an evil lesser than fornication. His personal views are reflected in the teachings which he fastened onto Christian theology: "It is good for a man not to touch a woman." "I would that all men were even as I myself." "I say, therefore, to the unmarried and widows, it is good for them to abide even as I."

Paul knew that such teachings were not a part of Jesus’ gospel, and his acknowledgment of this is illustrated by his statement, "I speak this by permission and not by commandment." This cult led Paul to look down upon women. And the pity of it all is that his personal opinions have long influenced the teachings of a great world religion, leading to the formation of celibate priesthoods.

Paul’s Christian church is the socialized and humanized shadow of what Jesus intended the kingdom of heaven to be — and what it most certainly will yet become. Paul and his successors partly transferred the issues of eternal life from the individual to the church. Christ thus became the head of the church rather than the elder brother of each individual believer in the Father’s family of the kingdom. Paul and his contemporaries applied all of Jesus’ spiritual implications regarding himself and the individual believer to the church as a group of believers; and in doing this, they struck a death blow to Jesus’ concept of the divine kingdom in the heart of the individual believer.

Early Christian doctrines were generally based on the personal religious experience of three individuals: Philo of Alexandria, Jesus of Nazareth, and Paul of Tarsus. While the Urantia Book does not record the resurrection appearance of Jesus to Paul, it elsewhere indicates Paul knew about the reality of angels, spiritual levels, and the status of the rebellious leaders

Paul preserved the principle of animal sacrifice in worship by formulating the doctrine of atonement for sin, being the shedding of blood. Paul started out to build a new Christian cult on “the blood of the everlasting covenant.” While he may have unnecessarily encumbered Christianity with teachings about blood and sacrifice, he did once and for all make an end to the doctrines of redemption through human or animal sacrifices.

His theological compromises indicate that even revelation must submit to the graduated control of evolution. According to Paul, Christ became the last and all-sufficient human sacrifice; the divine Judge is now fully and forever satisfied.