I suspect, but can’t prove, that the relationship of the early Christians, or at least the Pauline Gentile churches, to the Jews was more like that between Theosophists and Indians than people like to think.
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specifically i mean things like that the jews were a convenient group for psychological projection of the trauma, bullshit d conditioning of the spiritual seekers in Corinth, Thessalonika, etc.
I notice for instance that most of the stuff that they have “Paul” say about the Law is quite baffling psychobabble. When people discuss new religious movements today, a great emphasis is put on what went wrong – why were existing religions not doing it for them? Crowley makes no sense without knowing he was a Plymouth Brethren. A lot of 20th century ones fit into place as being anti-communist, or vehicles for psychedelic drugs.
People very seldom talk about the early Christians like this, and for the good reason that there’s no evidence of what they were like, and only very scanty evidence about proto-Christians. “Paul” babbling about the Law is probably the best source, but I haven’t come to any conclusions yet except that if “Paul”’s epistles are supposed to be the therapy, the symptoms must have been florid as fuck.
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To make it more implicit, the picture that is coming together in my mind is something like this:
there was a man who was born a gentile, but who was fascinated by new age stuff, especially Judaism, and we may as well call him Mr Little. Mr Little was primarily a fantasist, and in character not unlike my version of Sam Vimes – he boasts of himself that he was a great persecuter of Christians, and was a perfect Jew, a pharisee! of a royal tribe! with a royal name! But I think all of this was mostly in his heart – he loved the Jews as being an Other he could project his new age feelings onto – an ancient people, a proud people, a holy people, a special people, a Right people, and one that Mr Little longed to take for himself. Similarly, when Mr Little talks about how he was a great persecuter, I think he is also talking in his heart.
He has known people, fellow New Agers, who also love the Jewish lifestyle, but are happy being mediocre, admirers from a distance, Hypsistarians, God-Fearers, cultural appropriators. He doesn’t like them, and moves at some point to Jerusalem, where he makes up some story about him being born a Jew, maybe gets his foreskin cut off to pass, Richard Burton style, maybe doesn’t, but tries to act like a Pharisee to show the New Agers what authentic Judaism is like.
But it never takes – the Jews in Jerusalem can see through him and he doesn’t integrate, and he ends up falling into the New Age scene in Jerusalem and bumps up necessarily against the disciples of the risen Jesus.
I think the right sort of comparison here to get a picture of the very early Jerusalem church is somewhere between “an anarchist commune”, “an asylum of local schizos” and “a cult whose leader just got arrested and executed”. It is very easy, among such touchy people, mostly poor young men and women, to get a reputation of being a fascist, a cop, a fed, the worst kind of person, and I think this fate befell Mr Little, and it was a reputation that Mr Little took for himself for two reasons: it was the judgement of Authentic Jews and even being kicked around by such people was a kind of honour to him, because he had found a place among Authentic Jews and he was a freak whose delight was in resentment.
Secondly, because the early church so clearly loved Jesus, and something in the Gospel spoke to Mr Little. I think the first Christians were in the habit of telling tall tales about Jesus, a mixture of truthful stories about things the pre-resurrection Jesus did, Theory bullshit and all sorts of Unverified Personal Gnosis about the things that the invisible risen Jesus was doing in their lives. In this context, Mr Little’s Damascene vision is not so strange, because he was doing exactly the same thing as the apostles, and so why should he not be one?
Mr Little hangs around for a while, as it becomes clear that this band of losers are actually going somewhere, he can stop scene-hopping and recovers his reputation in a professionalising scene (his profession of “tent-maker” in the original Greek is literally a maker of scenes, a “scenester”, which I think invites eisegesis, but what eisegesis!) but is eventually sent off back to Asia Minor to evangelise there.
And the records of what he did there are recorded in the confusing mess of the Epistles, in which he is “all things to all men”, a Jew to the Jews and a Gentile to the Gentiles. The epistles, as confusing as they are, are edited highlights of what I can only imagine must be impressively crazy and manipulative original preaching, lying, exaggerating and people-pleasing. He got enough of a reputation as an important guy that when the New Age scenes in Asia Minor solidified, became Christian, and more evangelists come, his name got attached to other material – not like the authentic Mr Little stuff is so coherent that you can see the join – and his immortality was assured.