In answer to the video "Paul Won Converts Through Peaceful Preaching; Muhammad Used Bribes and Threats (PvM 17)"
Nothing about a dying messiah anywhere in the Hebrew writings. In addition to being "a" messiah, which requires the fulfillement of specific ritual and genealogical conditions which were never met in Jesus, the end times messiah also has to satisfy some lifetime requirements, including the global ingathering of the Jews, rebuilding of the temple, ushering of the age of unfaltering observance of the Law (which bellies by the way all of St Paul's innovations), universal peace, universal knowledge of God, blissful utopia, end of evil and sin, disease and death.
Obviously none of those criteria ever occured anywhere near Jesus' era, and in fact the least that can be said is that the 1st century, its overall state of upheaval, was the antithesis of what the messianic era is supposed to be. There isn't a single prophecy saying the Messiah would come, die, be resurrected, and then return thousands of years later to BEGIN his mission. It in facts says he will accomplish these tasks within his own lifetime Isa42:4"He shall not fail or be crushed until he has set the right in the earth". That is why the idea of a suffering king messiah is inexistent in pre-Christian Judaism. The awaited figure is in fact expected to violently enforce the new world order. In view if this, Christians also need to explain why would anyone not see the "second coming" theory as an attempt to explain away Jesus' failure during his "first coming" to usher the messianic era.
That is why Paul was met with fierce resistance when he preached to Jews and instead turned to the pagans who had no clue of what the Hebrew bible taught. He could now distort and reinterpret every aspect of it, as well as Jesus' teachings so as to fit the paradigms of the pagans he was preaching to.
These gentiles believed in Mithraism, a religion already spread all throughout Europe and Asia minor centuries prior to the birth of Christianity. This is the religion adopted by the pagan Roman authority, who had centuries of tradition of dying and/or mutilated savior gods, and ultimately institutionalized. As the early church father Justin Martyr conceded
"when we say...Jesus Christ, our teacher, was crucified, died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, we propose nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you consider sons of Zeus".
Paul, who was at most a hellenezied Jew, was explaining Jesus teachings in ways that were unheard of by Jesus' disciples. Paul's letters were written about AD 50-60, while the Gospels were not written until 60-90 meaning Paul's theories were already established before the unknown writers of the gospels started their works and earlier Christian thought was quickly branded heretical. The church was so weak that within the same generation of the disciples, this Jewish sect of the Nazarenes, whose distinction from mainstream Judaism was only in the belief that Jesus was the messiah, turned upon its heels, abandoned Jewish law, adopted concepts unheard of anywhere in Judaism. There is a reason why the Gospel writers including Paul do not quote the Hebrew Bible but the Greek Septuagint which was hated by the rabbis as it represented the Hellenization of many Jews of the time. The early church thus became irrelevant very early on following Jesus' departure, due to Paul's efforts at supplanting it, dismissing Jewish law as obsolete, reinterpreting core Semitic concepts of God so as to appeal to his pagan audience.
After Jesus' death, Paul's main problem was to convince his Jewish audience that the messiah's death, without accomplishing any of the messianic criteria, instead of being a failure was actually a necessity. He did so by introducing the doctrine of total depravity, making all humans de facto sinners and therefore in need of an atoning sacrifice Rom7:14-25,Rom3:10-11,5:13,8:7-8,1Cor2:14,Eph2:1-3,Titus3:3. His addressees however already believed in the resurrection of the dead, in a just God who forgave the sins of a penitent heart. Nothing was missing in their system that Jesus' sacrifice and resurrection could fix. Paul's redeeming hero was a redundancy to them, so he was obviously met with fierce resistance wherever he preached his unscriptural ideas. This led him to eventually turn to the gentiles among whom he found a much more favourable audience. All this is evident from a cursory reading of the NT and the writings of Paul. That is how Christianity was shaped, using its target audience's sensitivities all the while toning down to the maximum its Jewish heritage.
The sect that "won" and became "orthodoxy" achieved victory by political rather than epistemic means. The dominant branch was but one among many early, conflicting Christian sects, as even reflected in Paul's letters and the desperate struggles he had with them to maintain control of his own congregations. The process was not a difficult one considering Mithraism's tendency to accommodate with other rival cults, throughout its vast geographical spread, before and after Christianity. Christianity of course wasnt that accommodating, doing everything to supplant it due to the disturbing similarities. Many Church Fathers (Justin, Origen, Tertullian) attempted rationalizing the how Mithraism similarities with their religion; "satanic imitations" being the standard explanation. The fine details of those similarities are now lost due to the Christian destructions of all "mithraes" they could put their hands on as well as persecute its followers. The task of reconstructing which themes Mithraism absorbed from Christianity so as to embellish its own narrative, versus what actually pre-dated Christianity, becomes a speculative task. But the presence of such vehement defenses by church authorities reveals their major embarrassment, their discomfort at their opponents' accusations of plagiarism. Instead of engaging their critics in debate, these church fathers and other Christian "orthodox" writers of the 2nd and 3rd centuries slandered their opponents with exaggerated or even false charges, shunned them or socially intimidated them. This pattern of engaging their critics is in itself revealing of their own insecurities.
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