Saul of Tarsus – Jewish Encyclopedia
There is throughout Paul’s writings an irrational or pathological element which could not but repel the disciples of the Rabbis. Possibly his pessimistic mood was the result of his physical condition; for he suffered from an illness which affected both body and mind. He speaks of it as “a thorn in the flesh,” and as a heavy stroke by “a messenger of Satan” (II Cor. xii. 7), which often caused him to realize his utter helplessness, and made him an object of pity and horror (Gal. iv. 13). It was, as Krenkel has convincingly shown, epilepsy, called by the Greeks “the holy disease,” which frequently put him into a state of ecstasy, a frame of mind that may have greatly impressed some of his Gentile hearers, but could not but frighten away and estrange from him the Jew, whose God is above all the God of reason.
The actual founder of the Christian Church as opposed to Judaism; born before 10 C.E.; died after 63. The records containing the views and opinions of the opponents of Paul and Paulinism are no longer in existence; and the history of the early Church has been colored by the writers of the second century, who were anxious to suppress or smooth over the controversies of the preceding period, as is shown in the Acts of the Apostles and also by the fact that the Epistles ascribed to Paul, as has been proved by modern critics, are partly spurious (Galatians, Ephesians, I and II Timothy, Titus, and others) and partly interpolated.
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Nor is there any indication in Paul’s writings or arguments that he had received the rabbinical training ascribed to him by Christian writers, ancient and modern
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he was, if any of the Epistles that bear his name are really his, entirely a Hellenist in thought and sentiment. As such he was imbued with the notion that “the whole creation groaneth” for liberation from “the prison-house of the body,” from this earthly existence, which, because of its pollution by sin and death, is intrinsically evil
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His whole state of mind shows the influence of the theosophic or Gnostic lore of Alexandria, … hence his strange belief in supernatural powers, in fatalism, in “speaking in tongues” , and in mysteries or sacraments – a term borrowed solely from heathen rites.
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There is throughout Paul’s writings an irrational or pathological element which could not but repel the disciples of the Rabbis. Possibly his pessimistic mood was the result of his physical condition; for he suffered from an illness which affected both body and mind. He speaks of it as “a thorn in the flesh,” and as a heavy stroke by “a messenger of Satan” (II Cor. xii. 7), which often caused him to realize his utter helplessness, and made him an object of pity and horror (Gal. iv. 13). It was, as Krenkel has convincingly shown, epilepsy, called by the Greeks “the holy disease,” which frequently put him into a state of ecstasy, a frame of mind that may have greatly impressed some of his Gentile hearers, but could not but frighten away and estrange from him the Jew, whose God is above all the God of reason.
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Paul shrank from life as the domain of Satan and all his hosts of evil; he longed for redemption by the deadening of all desires for life, and strove for another world which he saw in his ecstatic visions.
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his conception of life was not Jewish. Nor can his unparalleled animosity and hostility to Judaism as voiced in the Epistles be accounted for except upon the assumption that, while born a Jew, he was never in sympathy or in touch with the doctrines of the rabbinical schools.
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Paul was of a fiery temper, impulsive and impassioned in the extreme, of ever-changing moods, now exulting in boundless joy and now sorely depressed and gloomy. Effusive and excessive alike in his love and in his hatred, in his blessing and in his cursing, he possessed a marvelous power over men; and he had unbounded confidence in himself.
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Paul’s “gnosis” is a revival of Persian dualism, which makes of all existence, whether physical, mental, or spiritual, a battle between light and darkness , between flesh and spirit, between corruption and life everlasting .
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He was certain that by the very power of their faith, which performed all the wonders of the spirit in the Church, would the believers in Christ at the time of his reappearance be also miraculously lifted to the clouds and transformed into spiritual bodies for the life of the resurrection. These are the elements of Paul’s theology – a system of belief which endeavored to unite all men, but at the expense of sound reason and common sense.
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Evidently Paul entertained long before his vision those notions of the Son of God which he afterward expressed; but the identification of his Gnostic Christ with the crucified Jesus of the church he had formerly antagonized was possibly the result of a mental paroxysm experienced in the form of visions.
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Still more is the partaking of the bread and the wine of the communion meal, the so-called “Lord’s Supper,” rendered the means of a mystic union with Christ, “a participation in his blood and body,” exactly as was the Mithraic meal a real participation in the blood and body of Mithra
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While Paul borrows from the Jewish propaganda literature, especially the Sibyllines, the idea of the divine wrath striking especially those that commit the capital sins of idolatry and incest (fornication) and acts of violence or fraudulence.
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It is accordingly not personal merit nor the greater moral effort that secures salvation, but some arbitrary act of divine grace which justifies one class of men and condemns the other (ib. ix.). It is not righteousness, nor even faith — in the Jewish sense of perfect trust in the all-loving and all-forgiving God and Father — which leads to salvation, but faith in the atoning power of Christ’s death, which in some mystic or judicial manner justifies the undeserving.
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According to his arguments, it is the Law that begets sin and works wrath, because without the Law there is no transgression. “I had not known lust, except the Law had said, Thou shalt not covet” (ib. vii. 7). He has no faith in the moral power of man: “I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) dwelleth no good thing”
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His antinomian theology is chiefly set forth in the Epistle to the Romans, many parts of which, however, are the product of the second-century Church with its fierce hatred of the Jew, e.g., such passages as ii. 21-24, charging the Jews with theft, adultery, sacrilege, and blasphemy